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Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

University Profile

The Free University of Bozen-Bolzano was founded in 1997. Our university has a strong international outlook, as testified by its multilingual courses (German, Italian, English and Ladin) and the high number of students and teaching staff from abroad.

Languages? An asset!

The university has five faculties, and a high percentage of lecturers (35%) and students (17%) come from abroad and they study, teach and do research in the fields of Economics, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Social Sciences, Education and Design. We have 4,100 students registered to more than 30 undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses.

The taught modules on offer and our research projects are linked to international and inter-regional networks. For example, within the Euregio university project, we are partnered with the universities of Innsbruck and Trento, and we are committed to reaching top quality standards.

Our teaching and research programmes revolve around five faculties and seven competence centres:

Languages? An asset!

What makes unibz stand out among all universities, in Italy and in Europe, is the multilingualism of its courses and research. The three official languages - Italian, German and English - are used during classes, meetings, conferences and in all events. Thus, the university offers an ideal environment not only to acquire specific knowledge in the disciplines at the basis of each one's degree course, but also to master the communication skills required by employment and by an increasingly globalised society.

Model

unibz in Rankings

In national rankings, our university reaches top positions every year. In 2023, for the seventh consecutive year, the Italian research centre for social studies Censis has ranked our university as number one among smaller private universities (less than 5,000 students). We rank high in international rankings too, especially under the categories 'internationalisation', 'student satisfaction' and 'citations'.

THE World University Rankings

THE World University Rankings

In the 2024Times Higher Education World University Rankings unibz ranked in the band of 351— 400 this year out of almost 1,904 institutions worldwide. Our strongest pillars are "Citations" (with a score of 85,5 among the top 300)  and "International outlook" (with a score of 78,6 among the top 300). In Italy we are on the 12th position out of 56 universities ranked. In the Small University Rankings 2023 we are on position 21.

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QS World University Rankings

QS World University Rankings

In 2023 unibz for the fourth time has entered the QS World University Rankings 2024 at rank position 641-650 among 5000 universities surveyed. It ranks among the top 220 in the metrics for “International Faculty ratio”.

QS World University Rankings

Censis

Censis

In 2023, for the seventh time in a row, we placed first among the small non-state universities.

Censis website

Quality Management

unibz adheres to European quality standards in all its activities: teaching, research and administration. These are supported and enforced by ANVUR, the national agency that assesses how the Italian university system works and the quality of its research.

For this reason, the Presidio di qualità (our quality assessment body), established by the Board of Directors, monitors our activities to make sure that the expected quality standards in the above mentioned aspects are met. This means that the members of our university community, during their activities, always have to bear in mind the quality goals we want to achieve.

Our strategy and three-year plan

unibz is a public institution,but not a state university. In addition to its own financial means to fund teaching and research, the university receives its largest share of funding from the Provincia Autonoma of Bozen-Bolzano, the local metropolitan administrative body. The basis of its strategic development is described in the strategic and financial plan 2023-2025 (only in IT and DE ) between unibz and the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano. As a higher education institution governed by public law, unibz has its own performance plan that defines its goals in administration practice.

As far as the quality standards for our degree courses and procedures to select our teaching staff are concerned, unibz adheres to the guidelines set by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR). However, with our university being a private institution, we can also hire up to 70% of our lecturers from abroad without a public call.