Universities: health, digital, green and AI. 158 new degree programmes on the way

Not since the immediate post-Covid period has there been such a marked interest in health in general among Italian university vice-chancellors. So much so that the number of new degree courses on the horizon in the healthcare sector now even outstrips those in the ‘green’ and ‘digital’ sectors, which had consistently been hugely popular in recent years. This is confirmed by the list of 158 university courses proposed for the 2026/27 academic year, which received the green light from the National University Council (CUN) in recent months and are now awaiting approval from ANVUR and the Ministry of University and Research (MUR). Although the final formal step is still pending, universities have already begun publicising the changes to their degree programmes far and wide. They hope to capture the interest of those last-minute undecided students who have just completed their A-levels and have not yet planned their future.

The first point worth noting is that, with 158 courses set to launch, the range of options available to students now exceeds 5,900 courses in total, including new courses, changes and updates. Here, we shall focus solely on the new courses, highlighting a couple of general points straight away. Firstly, 55 of the proposed courses are for a three-year bachelor’s degree, 101 for a master’s or single-cycle degree, and two for a professional degree. Furthermore, in only four cases is the sponsoring university an online institution, whilst in 22 cases it is a private university, including the four degree programmes at the Biomedical Campus in Rome, the three at Humanitas, and one each at Luiss (Data Science and Management), Bocconi (Global Law for Organisations, Businesses and Institutions) and Cattolica (Clinical and Health Psychology: from the hospital to the community). This means that the remaining 132 relate to a state-funded institution.

As regards delivery methods, the conventional model predominates, with 130 new programmes. By contrast, there are just five fully online programmes, of which three are in the field of telecommunications and two (Business Economics and Management in Cagliari and Business Economics at the University of Milan) are at traditional universities. These latter institutions also dominate the predominantly distance-learning provision, with 12 out of a total of 13 programmes (to which is added only Mercatorum’s Industrial and Innovation Engineering), as well as the blended online/on-campus provision, where they account for all ten programmes.

If we turn to the most popular fields of study, we see an early sign of our universities’ renewed interest in health, with no fewer than 152 courses relating to medical sciences (including the interdisciplinary programme in the technical and management sciences of sport and sports organisations, which is shared with the fields of history, philosophy, pedagogy and psychology). To put this into perspective, the second-largest group (Industrial and Information Engineering) techniques and management of sport and sports organisations, which is shared with the field of Historical, Philosophical, Pedagogical and Psychological Sciences). To put this into perspective, the second-largest group (Industrial and Information Engineering) comprises just 17 degree programmes.

Turning to the keywords of the new degree programmes, the healthcare sector boasts 25 proposals for new courses. The term ‘health’ is mentioned explicitly eight times and ‘healthcare’ 13 times, plus two Medicine programmes (in Florence and, in a Medtech version, in Padua) and another two Veterinary Medicine programmes (at Federico II University in Naples and at Link Campus). If we include the 32 new Nursing Science programmes in the tally, the healthcare sector comes out on top with 57 degree programmes.