Italy's credential trap: how university shortcuts and failed exams expose a broken system of professional qualification

On a spring morning in mid-May, a reader of Corriere della Sera's "L'esperto risponde" column typed out the now-familiar confession: years spent chasing a professional credential, a stack of failed exams, a stalled career, and a university programme that promised redemption but delivered only a longer receipt. The newspaper's advice columnist replied with the procedural map. Pay the university, enrol in the recovery programme, sit the examinations, obtain the missing credits. The architecture of failure is, in other words, perfectly legible to anyone who has tried to navigate it. The harder question is why the system is structured this way in the first place.

Italy's degree-redemption pathway exists because tens of thousands of students, often first-generation university attendees, leave their faculties with a fistful of credits but no laurea. The Corriere della Sera reader-services desk treats the case as routine correspondence, an advice problem. The framing reveals something more uncomfortable: the country's higher-education system has absorbed its structural dysfunction into the rhythm of a daily advice column. Each email is a small monument to a system that monetises the gap between enrolment and graduation without ever quite closing it.

How the credits become a toll

The mechanism works like this. A student enrols in a three-year course, often in professional faculties such as architecture, engineering, law, or the health sciences. They pass a portion of the examinations but fail to complete the full curriculum, sometimes because of working-hour conflicts, sometimes because of preparation gaps traceable to underfunded secondary schooling, sometimes because of family obligations. Years pass. The student discovers that, in order to sit for the state qualifying examination that would license their professional activity, they must first convert their abandoned career into a finished degree. They are told to return to the university, pay the tuition, re-enrol, and sit the outstanding examinations. There is no amnesty. There is no recognition of professional experience. The only path back runs through the same institution that failed them the first time.

The Corriere della Sera advice column handles this as a reader inquiry, a question of paperwork and patience. It is, on one level, exactly that. The expert answers the procedural question, lists the documentation, points the reader toward the university's student secretariat. The tone is courteous, administrative, faintly weary. What the column does not do, and what no Italian newspaper has so far done in any sustained way, is treat the recurring request as evidence of a design flaw in how the country prices and delivers higher-education credentials.

A market in unfinished degrees

Italy's universities operate under a financing model in which tuition fees supplement block grants from the state, and in which student throughput is treated as a budget variable rather than as an outcome metric. A student who completes a degree counts, for funding purposes, as one more graduate. A student who fails to complete a degree is, in the language of the rectorates, a dropout, but also a future revenue line: the moment they re-enrol to recover credits, they pay again. The system does not punish the university for the original failure. It rewards the university for the second attempt.

The Corriere della Sera expert-advice column is, in this sense, an informal customer-service channel for a state-subsidised enterprise that has externalised its after-care to a newspaper. Every reply is a small subsidy to a model that should not require the reader to write in. The advice is technically accurate. It is also a quiet admission that the ordinary channels of bureaucratic redress are not, in fact, accessible to the people who most need them.

What the missing credential is worth

The professional stakes are not abstract. In Italy, the qualifying examinations for many regulated professions, including architecture, engineering, accountancy, and the legal professions, are gated by possession of a laurea. Without it, a graduate who has practised informally for a decade, or a technician who has built a career on the strength of professional certifications, cannot sit the state exam. The exam itself functions as a licence to bill. The degree functions as a toll plaza on the road to that licence. The longer the toll plaza operates, the more it accrues to the institutions that staff it.

This is where the Italian case stops looking like a national curiosity. Across southern Europe, and increasingly across the OECD, governments have allowed universities to operate as credential authorities first and teaching institutions second. The Italian version is distinctive only in its candour: the advice column shows the system to itself, every weekday, in the language of the reader who has just discovered the price of admission.

The reform that never arrives

Each Italian government of the past two decades has promised a reform of university access and credentialing, and each has stepped back from confronting the funding logic that keeps the current system in place. The recovery pathway is, in policy terms, a deferred maintenance charge: it lets the universities continue to charge students twice for the same education while avoiding the politically toxic conversation about block-grant reform, staffing ratios, or the abolition of certain qualifying examinations.

The Corriere della Sera reader who wrote in mid-May will get their answer, pay their tuition, sit their examinations, and either obtain the degree or join the population of repeat enrolees who keep the system liquid. None of this will register as a scandal, because the system is designed to look like individual misfortune. That is the trap. The credential costs what it costs, and the cost is paid by the person who can least afford to question it.