Bocconi was the first in Italy to grant degrees in economics, and today the Italian ministry of education rates it among the nation's best in that field (alongside the smaller University of Modena and Reggio Emilia). The institution specializes in economics, management, finance, and law, and its M.B.A. program was recently ranked 20th in the world by The Wall Street Journal.

…"Italian universities are in the hands of a caste of barons who have no interest in making them function," says Fabio Scacciavillani, a Rome-based economist with Oxford Economic Forecasting, a multinational research and consulting group, "and the few who do care are trapped in a spider's web of medieval government regulations, and by a gang of colleagues who promote only their faithful disciples, friends, or relatives. Bocconi can be a happy island of sorts, but only in a sea of inefficiency, corruption, and bad administration."

…[The] unofficial Italian tenure system [is] one of "co-optation within institutions," through which a scholar's entire career, from undergraduate studies to full professorship, unfolds inside a single academic department, with promotion depending on the patronage of its elders.

This practice (also prevalent in some other European countries, particularly Spain) undermines the quality of research that a university produces, by shielding its scholars from outside competition and cutting them off from wider currents of thought…

…"We were strongly attacked by the other universities," says Andrea Sironi, a professor of finance. "Because they had no selection at all, they were taking all our worst students which were not admitted here, and we were taking their best. So of course it's not nice. ... But that's the way it works in the world."

…One prominent critic, Marcello Fontanesi, rector of the University of Milan-Bicocca, argued in a national newspaper that such a competitive admissions policy could actually lead to lower standards, since comparative measures are no guarantee of the skills necessary for higher-level work.