Quality Assurance

In the Strategic Planning Document of the Free University of Enna Kore for the three-year period 2021–2023 – approved by the Council of Guarantors, following Ministerial Decree no. 989 of 25 October 2019, on 12 February 2020, and subsequently approved in a new version on 15 July 2021 following Ministerial Decree no. 289 of 25 March 2021, published on 21 May 2021, with further revisions made on 14 March 2022, 10 October 2022 and lastly on 12 December 2022 – the UKE Board of Trustees consolidated the strategic orientation of the University, indicating the objective of the continuous transition from the essentially quantitative development of results (which has in fact seen the University grow strongly since 2005, the year of its foundation) to the qualitative development of the same results achieved and of the management processes.

The Quality Policy of Kore University responds not only to the need to obtain the satisfaction of users and their families, which alone would be short-term and short-term, but to the more significant need to provide services of increasing quality levels, such as to actually gain the approval of students in terms of long-term results, in turn based on adequately motivated processes, carefully monitored, systematically corrected for imperfections and therefore constantly improved.

UKE's Quality policy also aims at an increasingly effective use of the resources that the University commits at a human, financial and structural level. Such effectiveness is closely connected to the efficiency of the processes and their cost-effectiveness, in terms of a relationship tending towards excellence between uses and results.

Consequently, the Quality Policy is also a policy for the best investment of resources, the procurement of which came, almost entirely, from the fees paid by enrolled students.

Customer focus – specifically, Student focus – is a constant University policy at all levels.

In the design, organization and delivery of teaching, as well as in the planning of research activities, which is in turn interconnected with the quality of teaching, UKE pursues a Quality Policy that takes into account several factors. First of all, in a country that is in a backward position in the European Union and in the OECD system for the percentage of graduates in the age group following tertiary education, it cannot be assumed that university education should be limited to satisfying the immediate needs of the world of professions and dependent work, also because we do not know their real needs in the medium-long term, which is the goal of training: we cannot in fact predict the employment dimension in the medium-long term, in which context university education can concretely be invested in the context of lifelong learning.

It should also be considered that the wide mobility of young people – nationally and internationally – makes a program of study paths drawn up on the basis of regional indicators obsolete and impractical, which should therefore be considered within the limits of their very relative importance. For this reason, the UKE preferentially uses sector studies for the design of new study courses instead of and in addition to the hearings of the social partners.

Precisely the awareness of the unpredictability of the developments of the labour market in the next decade and in the following decades – which the UKE feels even more due to the fact that it insists in a territorial and macro-regional basin that is particularly precarious with respect to youth employment indices and not only – requires a high-quality university education, capable of putting graduates in the position of knowing how to face the challenges that will arise for them, not only in the first three or five years post-degree, but above all in the later phases of their lives, should they not resolve the initial problems of employment and professional commitment strictly connected with the qualification.

In this perspective, the Kore University of Enna intends to further strengthen the culture of self-assessment, increasing both responsible planning, monitoring and evaluation of results and the adoption of recovery measures for non-compliant results, based on verified data and shared and disseminated process indicators.