Master's Degree Programme in International Management

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice runs an English-taught, two-year Master’s Degree Programme in International Management — 120 ECTS, degree class LM-77, based at the Venice School of Management on the San Giobbe campus.¹ ² It is the cheapest English-taught Italian MiM we profile, and the reason is structural: Ca’ Foscari is a public university, so it charges Italian public tuition rather than a business-school price.⁴ ⁵

Overview

Ca’ Foscari’s Department of Management, known internationally as the Venice School of Management, was accredited by EFMD’s EQUIS scheme in an announcement made in December 2023 — the second public university department in Italy to hold it.⁷ That matters more here than a league-table position, because the programme does not appear on the Financial Times Masters in Management table at all: the case for it rests on accreditation, an English-taught LM-77 curriculum, and a cost base that is an order of magnitude below Italy’s private schools. For the wider picture, see our comparison of the best MiM programmes in Italy.

Curriculum & Structure

The programme is built to prepare managers for “socioeconomic transformations at both national and international levels,” with an emphasis on strategic planning and on analytical and decision-making tools at corporate, business and functional level.² Ca’ Foscari describes the pathway as flexible — a mix of compulsory and elective courses students customise — and the teaching as learning-by-doing, with project work, real case studies and direct involvement from companies and institutions.² Attendance is not compulsory, and the published occupational profiles lean commercial: marketing manager, market analyst, and marketing and communication consultant, alongside founding a venture.²

The degree carries double and joint degree options.¹ The best-documented is the pathway with Universität Hohenheim in Germany: 60 ECTS in Venice, 60 ECTS in Hohenheim, both degrees awarded, with eight places open to students already enrolled in the first year.⁸

Application & Deadlines

International Management is a limited-admission programme.¹ Candidates sit a remote entry test that produces a ranking list, and only those placed high enough may enrol.³ There is no GMAT or GRE requirement.³

What actually gates admission is the curricular requirement. A bachelor’s in the Italian L-18 or L-33 classes — business administration or economics — or an equivalent qualification satisfies it outright.³ Anyone else needs at least 60 CFU: a minimum of 20 CFU in the business field including at least one exam in the SECS-P/07 area, plus 40 CFU across economics, law and statistics/mathematics with at least one exam in each.³ A minimum B2 level of English is mandatory for enrolment.³

Applicants holding an international qualification apply through apply.unive.it in citizenship-specific admission rounds.³ ¹⁰ The portal is genuinely built that way: it publishes three separate versions of the same “Admission rounds” article and shows you one of them based on the nationality you set on its home page, which is why the calendar looks absent until you do. For 2026/27 the rounds were 17 December 2025 to 14 January 2026 and 4 February to 4 March 2026, with a final deadline for all master’s degrees of 17 June 2026 for EU/EEA citizens, citizens of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland or Vatican City, and non-EU applicants already holding an Italian residence permit valid for enrolment.¹⁰ ¹² That cycle is closed. Read under a visa-requiring nationality, the same article now says plainly that *“it is no longer possible for non-EU applicants requiring a visa to apply for admission to a bachelor’s or master’s degree in the 2026/27 academic year.”*¹⁰

Three rules around those dates are worth more than the dates themselves, because each of them forecloses something.

• One application per academic year. Ca’ Foscari is explicit: “You can only submit one application in a single round for a given academic year. It is therefore not possible to apply for a programme in one admission round and then apply for admission to another programme in a different admission round,” and *“It will not be possible to change the order of your priorities after you submit your application.”*¹¹ A single €30 application fee covers up to two programmes inside that one application, so the two-programme choice and the ranking between them are decisions you make once.¹¹
• The scholarship money is in rounds one and two only. Ca’ Foscari’s merit awards for high-achieving international students are open “during the first and second admission rounds only” — so a candidate who waits for the final June deadline is still admissible and is no longer fundable.¹⁰ ¹²
• The clock after the round is long. Master’s applicants can expect feedback on their first-priority programme “within approximately 8 weeks of the end of the admission round in which they applied” (bachelor’s, about six), because a master’s file goes through a Welcome Unit eligibility pre-evaluation and then a Teaching Committee review of the academic background and CV.¹⁰

The three dates on our tracker are projections of the 2027/28 cycle from that 2026/27 pattern, drawn hollow and labelled indicative, because Ca’ Foscari has not published the 2027/28 calendar yet — checked 2 September 2026. On the Italian-qualification route, Ca’ Foscari published a 2026-cycle calendar: registration for the admission test from 4 June to noon on 8 July 2026, with the test on Wednesday 22 July 2026.³ If you need a visa, treat your round as the earliest one available to you; our MiM application timeline sets out how far ahead that has to start.

Tuition & Funding

This is the part worth reading twice. For 2026/27, a non-EU student who cannot obtain an Italian ISEE pays a flat annual amount set by country band: €2,300 for a master’s degree from an OECD country, €1,300 from most other non-EU countries, and €700 from a country classified as low human development.⁴ Each of those figures already includes the €192 regional right-to-study tax and the €16 stamp duty, and part-time enrolment is charged at 65%.⁴

Students assessed on income pay on the ISEE scale instead: with an ISEE under €25,000 and the merit requirements met, the bill is the €192 regional tax and €16 stamp duty only; the ceiling for a master’s is €2,394 a year (€2,134 where the benefit procedure was completed).⁵ Every step — enrolment, ISEE certification and the benefit request — has to be done by 30 September 2026 to avoid the maximum.⁵ Non-EU students can access the ISEE route only if they qualify for equivalence with Italian and EU citizens, which requires an Italian tax domicile of at least two years or family ties to an EU citizen.⁴

Across two years, then, the tuition range is roughly €1,400 to €4,800 — against about €7,900 at Politecnico di Milano and roughly €34,000–€37,000 at LUISS and Bocconi. Venice’s living costs are the real budget line, not the tuition; our cost of a MiM in Europe guide covers how to size that.

One scheduling note, because the dates above and the money above are on different clocks: every figure in this section belongs to Ca’ Foscari’s a.y. 2026/27 schedule, which is the latest the university publishes — re-read at source on 3 September 2026, its tuition hub lists 2025/2026 and 2026/2027 and nothing later.⁴ Ca’ Foscari states that each year’s amounts, deadlines and benefits go up in May, so the 2027/28 figures should appear around May 2027, after most of the rounds charted above have closed.

Funding on top of it is genuine rather than nominal. Ca’ Foscari’s Honours Scholarships pay €10,000 a year for two years, with 20 awards for master’s applicants and a cumulative GPA equivalent to 85% or higher required.⁶ The page has already rolled forward to the 2027/2028 intake on the same terms, and says the full call “with all of the specific instructions and deadlines to apply will be published here in the late fall.”⁶

We previously wrote that an Honours Scholarship, being a university award, sits outside the incompatibility rule that governs Italy’s national schemes. Reading the call itself, that was wrong, and it is the kind of error that costs a reader money rather than marks. Article 2 of the 2026/2027 call gives the Honours Scholarship its own incompatibility clause: *“The scholarship is incompatible with any other scholarship awarded by the Italian Government or by Italian public institutions, including the need-based scholarship for student financial aid awarded by the Veneto Region.”*¹² So the regional right-to-study grant is barred against this award too — the bar simply comes from a different document. The rest of the call is worth reading before you plan around the headline number:¹²

• It is a competition on four inputs, not a grade threshold. Master’s candidates are scored out of 98: up to 60 for the weighted average of the bachelor’s, 16 for up to two reference letters from university professors (at least one is mandatory), 15 for a three-minute motivational video, and 7 for a language certificate — C2 or native scores the full 7, C1 six, B2 three, none zero. The 85% CGPA is the floor to be eligible (a weighted average of “at least 8.5 out of 10”), not the bar to win.
• There is a per-nationality cap. “Scholarships can be awarded to a maximum of 4 candidates with the same citizenship.” If you are applying from a country that sends Ca’ Foscari a lot of applicants, you are competing against your own compatriots for four places, not against the whole field for twenty. Ties go to the younger applicant.
• It is not a fee waiver. “Awardees are not exempt from paying the tuition fees they owe upon enrolment,” and the amounts are taxable in Italy. Against Ca’ Foscari’s tuition that hardly matters — but it means the €10,000 is income, not a discount.
• The Hohenheim route can disqualify you. Scholarships “cannot be assigned to students enrolling in joint or double bachelor’s or master’s degree programmes for which the tuition fee is due to a university other than Ca’ Foscari.” The double degree described above and this scholarship interact, and the call does not spell out the Hohenheim case either way — ask before you commit to both.
• “For two years” is conditional. The second year renews automatically only if you enrol for 2027/2028 having earned 48 ECTS by 30 September 2027 at a weighted average of at least 26/30, and the final instalment additionally requires graduating in the last session of that year. A revoked scholarship must be repaid, and the academic career is blocked until it is.
• The dated ladder for the 2026/2027 round, as the shape to expect a year later: rounds 1 and 2 ran 17 Dec 2025 – 14 Jan 2026 and 4 Feb – 4 Mar 2026, the scholarship application closed at 1:00 p.m. CEST on 31 March 2026, referees could still submit until 14 April, rankings were published by 29 May, and winners then had three calendar days to accept and pay a €50 acceptance fee (credited against tuition), with visa evidence due by 30 September 2026.

Ca’ Foscari is also one of the two Italian schools we profile that participates in Invest Your Talent in Italy, MAECI’s scholarship-and-internship scheme, which its financial-aid page offers to “master’s degree students enrolling in an English-taught programme in the fields of Economics, Management, Engineering or High Technology” — the other is Politecnico di Milano, and none of Italy’s private business schools is on the list.⁶ Both national schemes are worth €10,800 for 2026/2027 and carry a tuition-fee waiver; neither is the monthly stipend they are usually described as, and a MAECI grant cannot be combined with a regional right-to-study award.⁹ The honest summary across all three: each award carries its own incompatibility article, and none of them is safe to assume stacks with another. Our guide to scholarships for a MiM in Italy explains how those routes sequence.

The honest read

Ca’ Foscari is not a brand that outranks Bocconi, and nothing here should be read as claiming it does. No FT or QS Masters in Management placement, no published salary or employment outcomes for this programme, and no class profile — we looked, and Ca’ Foscari does not publish them, so we do not state them. What is verifiable is a real, English-taught, EQUIS-accredited LM-77 in Venice, with double degrees, no GMAT, and a two-year tuition bill smaller than one term at a private Italian school.

That makes it a specific kind of choice: strong if you want an Italian management master’s at public-university cost and are willing to trade league-table brand for it, weak if your plan depends on the recruiting funnel a top-15 FT school opens. If salary outcomes are the deciding factor, weigh it against our Italy career outcomes read and the highest-salary MiM programmes list before committing.