New evidence on interregional mobility of students in tertiary education: the case of Italy (original) (raw)

University mobility at enrollment: geographical disparities in Italy

2016

Using a micro-dataset of Italian students enrolled at university for the first time in 2008 and derived from the Anagrafe Nazionale degli Studenti (ANS), we model internal student mobility as a function of both individual-level and territorial characteristics. We use multilevel modelling to explicitly account for the hierarchical nature of our data (students nested within Italian districts - NUTS-3 geographic aggregation level) and to understand whether there are significant variations in mobility patterns within and between districts. District differences in student mobility remain significant even after controlling for individual characteristics: this result confirms that the geographical dimension is relevant for student mobility.

Moving from North to North: how are the students’ university flows?

Genus

Student mobility has been much commented upon and much studied. Student mobility has social, economic, and political consequences. This form of mobility is relevant, in Italy, in terms of south-north flows, while the mobility of northern students toward the South and Centre of Italy is negligible. To the best of our knowledge, a proper focus on the dynamics among northern regions has not yet been carried out. This study focuses on the interregional mobility of northern first-year students. To this end, we use a longitudinal dataset with students’ individual histories from 2008 to 2017, obtained from the cohort-based datasets collected using the Italian Ministry of University’s administrative databases. Descriptive and model-based analyses are employed for assessing the association between the propensity to move and individual characteristics, as well as some territorial variables. A longitudinal study is also considered. Here, we see an increase in the population entering the univer...

Student mobility in higher education: Sicilian outflow network and chain migrations

2019

The Italian public universities are subsidised within a competitive framework that awards excellence, efficiency, and the capacity of universities to attract students from Italian regions other than its own. However, repeated cuts to public spending has increased the well-known Italian North-South divide. The most important student mobility (SM) flow is from the Southern to the Central-Northern regions--a phenomenon that has been magnified by an increasing number of outgoing students from Sicily over the last decade. In this paper, we rely upon micro-data of university enrolment and students' personal records for three cohorts of freshmen, in order to investigate preferential patterns of SM from Sicily toward universities in other regions. Indeed, our main goal is to eventually reveal the existence of chain migrations, through which students from a particular geographical area move towards a particular destination. We consider 38 clusters aggregating the 390 Sicilian municipalit...

University quality, interregional brain drain and spatial inequality. The case of Italy

2009

Universities are increasingly recognized as key driver of economic development through their role in knowledge production and human capital accumulation, and as attraction poles for talents. That is why this paper analyses the sequential migration behaviour of Italian students-graduates before their enrolment at university, and after graduation, and the role that university quality has in these choices. From a regional development perspective, a better understanding of the causes of Italian interregional brain drain may help to guide policy intervention aimed at reversing or partially compensating for its negative effects on the source regions. The results confirm 'university quality' as a «supply» tool for policy makers to counterbalance the negative effects of the brain drain on human capital accumulation.

Students' Mobility and Regional Disparities in Quality and Returns to Education in Italy

The paper analyzes the characteristics of the supply of higher education in different geographical macroareas using a strategic interaction framework. We investigate the issue of educational quality differentials in a centralized funding system. In the presence of moving costs and asymmetric information on individuals ability, we show that only highability students acquire education and the quality of education is lower in macroareas where the moving costs are higher in the only perfect Bayesian equilibrium consistent with forward induction. Our model predicts that direct subsidies to universities may be ineffective in improving the quality of education in the less developed areas. When regional disparities are not too large, efficiency can be increased by subsidizing student mobility.

Exploring determinants and trend ofSTEM students internal mobility. Someevidence from Italy

Electronic Journal of Applied Statistical Analysis, 2019

In the last years, there is a widespread consensus that Science, Technology,Engineering and Math (STEM) education is crucial for long-term productivityand growth of a country. In this light, the paper aims to explore thephenomenon of mobility of Italian STEM students, namely the ows of graduatedstudents from the Southern regions who enrol in the universities ofNorthern/Central area and choose a STEM degree course. We exploit themicrodata of Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR)referring to 8 cohorts (from a.y. 2008/2009 to a.y. 2015/16) of enrolled studentsin STEM elds residing in the south of Italy. The main results of ouranalysis show that the ow of STEM movers increases from year to year.This ow particularly aects the top performing students and, therefore, itis a threat to the socio-economic growth prospects of the Southern regionswhose gap with respect to the Central and Northern regions is expected togrow year by year.

Students’ university mobility patterns in Europe: an introduction

Genus

This thematic series collects some papers on Italian students' mobility. The aim of this thematic series is twofold. First, to describe the phenomenon which is important for universities and for its negative socio-economic implications for the South of Italy. Second, to propose new applications of statistical methods for this topic and applications which can be extended to other forms of migration, too.

Movers and stayers in STEM enrollment in Italy: who performs better?

Genus, 2021

Recently, the mobility behavior of Italian university students has garnered increasing interest from both social scientists and politicians. The very particular geographical characteristics of the country, together with the recognized persistence of a significant economic gap between the southern and northern regions, drive a large number of students to move from the first macro-region to the latter. As this phenomenon has several economic and social implications for policy-makers—at both central and local levels—it has led to various theories and prejudices. The present article will study the differences between the performance of STEM students who have decided to move from the south to the north and those who have decided to stay close to their hometowns. We devised multilevel modelling techniques to analyze this issue using administrative microdata from the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research (MUR), including eight cohorts of students from AY 2008–2009 to AY 2015–16, w...

The effect of academic mobility on research performance: The case of Italy

Quantitative science studies, 2022

This work investigates the effects of researchers' mobility on their research performance. The reference context is that of national intrasector mobility, in a country, Italy, characterized by a research system lacking the typical elements of an academic labor market. In particular, the analysis was conducted on 568 academics working at national universities and affected by mobility in the period 2009-2014. The effect of mobility on the variation of performance at the turn of the transfer was analyzed considering the interplay of demographic/sociological characteristics of the researchers, as well as contextual factors related to both the organization of origin and destination. Results show that it is the less productive academics who represent the larger share of those who move, and more than half of the mobile academics worsen their performance after the transfer.

Student mobility - Recruitment to studies and supply of post-graduates in a geographical perspective

2013

An important incentive for a regional, decentralised university- and college structure is that higher education institutions should supply the local labour markets with sufficient high-educated labour. Local and regional recruitment to studies is expected to increase the probability that post- graduates will stay in the regions after studies. The main aim of the paper is to investigate the function of the higher education institution due to the local, regional and national recruitment to high education and the local, regional and national distribution of the supply of post-graduates. The investigation is based on the geographical recruitment to university and college graduation in the year of 2002 by the regional residential background of students defined by categories of regions by distance from the region of study. Second, the regional distribution of the supply of post-graduates is based on all students in the year of 2004 that were not in higher education in the year of 2005 and...