Matching education and scientific specialization of European universities: A Micro-based Country Level Analysis

The diversity of Higher Education Institutions is well studied in the literature while their disciplinary specialization has received less attention. Even if some authors suggest taking into account the disciplinary specialization of universities to carry out meaningful comparisons, the results obtained thus far about the connection between disciplinary specialization and performance seem still anecdotic and do not find definitive evidence. In this paper, we attempt to contribute to the advancement of this field of research proposing some empirical evidence about the existing matching or mismatching between the educational and the scientific specialization of European universities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt done thus far. We adopt a multi-level perspective by providing analysis on different levels of aggregation, starting from institution (micro) level data, which are further aggregated at country level. We calculate Balassa indices of specialization on teaching and research and show the existence of matching and mis-matching in different fields across Europe.