Alta Scuola Politecnica: an ongoing experiment in the multidisciplinary education of top students towards innovation in engineering,architecture and design

Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino, the top technical universities in Italy, united their efforts in 2004 by launching a unique excellence programme called Alta Scuola Politecnica (ASP). The ASP programme is devoted to 150 students, selected each year from among the top 5–10% of those enrolled in the Engineering, Architecture and Design MSc programmes at each institution. This paper reports on the original motivation, evolution, lessons learned, present status, results, challenges and perspectives of ASP. In particular, the issues related to the selection of the ASP class and to its multidisciplinary nature, the cultural track of ASP and also its sustainability in connection with its location inside the Milano-Torino framework will be highlighted.     

Research in non-university higher education institutions. The case of the Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences

This paper presents the development of research in the Swiss non-university higher education sector and frames it in the debate on the organization of higher education systems in Western Europe and on the dynamics between university and non-university sector. It shows that, in the Swiss case, the applied research mandate has been used to differentiate these institutions from universities and that this endeavor has been to a large extent successful in technology, while it has been a source of major tensions in the other domains. I conclude that the development of research in the non-higher education leads to complex dynamics of convergence and of differentiation and that this process is strongly influenced by the specificities and differences between different subject domains.