A new year at the Liuc University starts: “The University is in attendance of innovation.”

The numbers that sign the beginning of the new academic year of Liuc University are comforting, starting precisely from the most important one: the university enrolment, +24% in just one year. “This year more than ever one of the keywords will be equity,” explains the President Michele Graglia, “a pivotal principle in the distribution of the resources.” Therefore the challenge for the next years will be “to conjugate growth and equity, development and meritocracy,” with the awareness that “today more than ever our youngsters have to invest on their own competences and their own capability of being protagonists in the global world.”

“For a student, the university is not only an investment in human capital, but also a precious signal of their own value in terms of competence, reliability and acceptance of a system of values,” explained the Dean Valter Lazzari, pointing out that simultaneously the youngsters are asking for “an adequate return along their own lives.” This is exactly the reason why during the years the Liuc University reiterated the value of “the university intended as a physical community, where the direct interaction among people is still the cornerstone of an all-round experience of growth and formation.” In this field, the University in Castellanza, is on the front line: internationalization, a degree in economics in English, jurisprudence, engineering school, smart up. “All these innovations were born from the constant contact with the labour world and let us create new working profiles,” continues Graglia, “because building competences is the first objective Liuc University is running after.” In fact, the president of Cattaneo University points out that “we were born no more than 20 years ago with a mission: to prepare youngsters to support the development of that immense entrepreneurial patrimony that characterised our territory.”

Today, despite the crisis, “We have to reiterate this mission and beside the formation, we concentrate even more on the research that can offer support and development. From a university for the companies, to a university for a new professionalism. However, all Liuc’s projects, especially the ones that look abroad, have a common denominator that we cannot misunderstand: “We internationalize to let our youngsters face the global world, but we never have to give the impression that we are giving them the instruments to run away.” And it is exactly for this reason that the new academic year started with two lessons fixed on the Italian current events: Professor Franco Gallo faced the theme of the tributary system in terms of major distributive equity, nutrition and tributary system.

But the occasion is useful to launch an alarm about the public funds, “This is the first year that the global amount of ordinary capital funding of the universities is not lower than the one of the year before,” explains Graglia, “But is also true that even more drastic reductions for private universities are not expected.” Liuc will have to deal with a net decrease of the state transfers, which only during the last academic year have been snipped by 25%.