The paper revisits the outbreak of Covid-19 in Italy and particularly in Lombardy region, the first and initially most severely affected area among western countries. First, we provide an overview of the impact of the pandemic in the country and in the region, mentioning the turning points and the main effects on the national and local economy. Second, we focus on the impact in the educational sector, by describing an overview of the university’s activities and reporting the actions undertaken by our home university, Politecnico di Milano, a technological university located in Milan (Lombardy region). We report the activities during the three main stages of the pandemic: the reaction, the management of the emergency and the planning of the new normality. Finally, we provide considerations on the main elements emerging from our commentary, showing the prominent roles of governance and communication in ensuring continuity for students, support for faculty and the redesign of services for the administrative staff. A student-centric approach and a high engagement of the entire community are the main elements that brought together the organisation to face the emergency and plan for the future, where the digital and physical layers coexists.

We employ Data Envelopment Analysis to compute the technical efficiency of Italian and English higher education institutions. Our results show that, in relation to the country‐specific frontier, institutions in both countries are typically very efficient. However, institutions in England are more efficient than those in Italy when we compare jointly their performances. We also look at the evolution of technical efficiency scores over a four‐year period, and find that, in line with an error‐correction hypothesis, Italian universities are improving their technical efficiency while English universities are obtaining stable scores. Policy implications are addressed.

In this paper, we estimate a variety of models to evaluate costs in US higher education institutions. A particularly innovative feature of our approach involves the estimation of latent class and random parameter stochastic frontier models of a multiproduct cost function: this allows us fully to accommodate both the heterogeneity across institutions and the presence of technical inefficiencies. Such methodological strategy is essential in analyzing the US HE system, which is characterized by a strong internal differentiation. Our main findings are two. First, on public policy grounds, the estimates suggest that global economies could be achieved by effecting a reduction in the number of institutions providing undergraduate instruction, while increasing the number of institutions engaged in postgraduate activity. Second, the current existing rankings turn out as coherent with ratings provided by the calculation of efficiency scores