Number of students at leading Italian universities 2019/2020

In the academic year 2019/2020, over 104 thousand students were enrolled at La Sapienza University of Rome, making it the largest Italian university. Furthermore, the University of Bologna , which also ranks as the best Italian university, followed in the list with 82 thousand students, while the University of Turin, ranked third. In total, 1.8 million students were enrolled at Italian universities.

Ancient, public, and digital higher education

Among the 20 largest Italian universities, 18 of them are public institutes. The two private universities in the list are Catholic University of Milan and Pegaso University. The latter is an online university, founded only in 2006 and counting roughly 55 thousand enrolled students. However, some of the oldest universities in the world are located in Italy. The University of Naples is the oldest public university in the world, whereas the University of Bologna is the oldest university overall.

Popular courses of study

Back in the Middle Age, the University of Bologna offered mainly subjects as liberal arts, law, and theology. However, these seem to rank lower among the most common degrees nowadays. Over 50 thousand students in Italy enrolled in economics programs, the most popular field of study. Moreover, industrial engineering and computer engineering were the second most popular degree programs.