Labour market response models for university evaluation

In this work we tried to measure the quality of the universities in terms of em-ployment outcomes of their graduates. In addition to previous findings in the liter-ature, we are interested in assessing whether the research activities of universities and/or departments have any bearing on the outcomes of the teaching activities. If universities are conceived as multi-product organizations, oriented to both teach-ing and research, the question naturally arises whether there is complementarity or substitutability between the twos. Among the problems we face, there are the appropriate measure of employability of graduates, the appropriate measure of research activity, the correct unit of analysis (universities or school/departments) and the correct methods for assessing university quality. 1 Related works It is generally difficult to measure the quality of education imparted, because on the one hand the benefits emerge over the entire lifecycle, and on the other hand the benefits often involve very different dimensions of life. Moreover, in Italy there are no longitudinal databases that are informative of all dimensions. For this reason, we shall restrict ourselves to a more limited perspective, considering the (first) transition from university to the labor market. As many other papers in the field, we use the most recent ISTAT survey on 2004 graduates, collected 3 years after graduation (in case of release of the new survey, conducted in 2010, we will try to update our analysis). In the Italian case other papers have goals similar to ours, since they have ex-plored the university contribution to employability ((4), (7), (5)). For the Caripl