This paper presents an application of a novel method of evaluation of an academic institution. The institution (the University of Calabria, Italy) is considered as a "Conversion System" that produces graduates and scientific activity. The approach used in the evaluation is a direct development of the Extended Exergy Accounting procedure proposed in previous publications by one of the authors: in fact, it represents a unified coherent formalization of Engineering Cost Analysis, Cumulative Exergy Consumption and Thermo-economics, and allows a quantitative comparison of the resource intensity of energy and industrial systems, including labor, capital and environmental impact. Some of the issues that are difficult to address with a purely monetary theory of value can be resolved by Extended Exergy Accounting" ("EEA") methods, without introducing arbitrary assumptions external to the theory. In this respect, EEA may be regarded as a natural development of the economic theory of production of commodities, which it extends by properly accounting for the unavoidable energy dissipation in the productive chain. After a brief summary of the basics of the EEA method, a formal analysis of the University of Calabria is presented and discussed. It is shown that the solution indeed reproduces some of the results that can be obtained by a standard economic analysis, and that the method provides some additional useful insight on the sources of inefficiency in the system and of the methods for their possible avoidance.
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