Internazionalizzazione e Ospitalità Universitaria in Italia: le Dimensioni del Fenomeno

In the last decade, the Italian University has been involved in an important and articulated process of transformation. The search for excellence, innovative teaching and the third mission are just some of the objectives of this unavoidable process of change, which is still in progress today. Within this transformative framework, the internationalization of the Universities’ education offer, plays a strategic and transversal role becoming one of the most challenging areas, even in term of engaging the European horizon and connecting the most prestigious and listed international universities in the world rankings. This is a rapidly growing phenomenon justified by two irreversible aspects. The first relates to the extraordinary success of the Europeanisation of higher education in the EU, supported by a series of specific projects and funding to support mobility. The second is the awareness of the global dimension of higher education. The growing demand is manifested in massive migratory dynamics, which pose a strategic challenge to all universities and offer new opportunities, which are not limited to the European sphere alone. As universities compete to attract more and more students from other geographical contexts, proposing ambitious English language training programs, double degrees, international study and research program exchanges, the impact of internationalization on the student population involved in university hospitality processes has not yet been adequately recognized, addressed, and studied. This contribution, reporting some of the results of a research, currently developed in Politecnico of Milan, covers the following objectives through an analysis of the demographic evolution of the university population present in our educational system, observed in the last ten years: 1. mapping and critically analyzing the phenomenon of internationalization in training courses, with the aim of restoring the national picture of current trends in the mobility of the university population; 2. return a cognitive picture of the impact of this process on models of public university hospitality. Finally, the paper proposes critical reflections in support of the development of more open, inclusive, and continuous hospitality models that can help to adequately support international students in mobility and help to implement the processes of attraction related to knowledge.