From South to North? Mobility of Southern Italian students at the transition from the first to the second level university degree

Abstract

In the last decades, the Italian University System has encountered several structural reforms aimed at making it more internationally competitive. Among them, the introduction of the University financial autonomy has triggered an “internal” competition among Universities to attract students from the entire country. Students’ enrollment at the first level has decreased significantly especially after the economic crisis of 2008, while the students’ migration from the South to the Central and Northern regions of the country has increased. These phenomena have created further inequalities within the country and a cultural and socio-economic loss for the South that does not appear to slow down. While Italian internal mobility at the first level has been previously investigated, second level mobility has received little attention. This work attempts to fill this gap, by analyzing the transition from first to second level university degree courses of the Southern Italian students in terms of macro-regional mobility. The data were provided by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. They are a national level longitudinal administrative micro-data on educational careers of the freshmen enrolled at the first level Italian university degree course in 2008–09 and followed up to 2014. We will use a discrete-time competing risk model with the aim to detect the determinants of the choices of Southern Italian students after their bachelor degree: discontinuing university; enrolling at the second level University degree course in a Southern university, or (moving) to Central or Northern universities. We will analyze the role played by demographic variables, time elapsed to get the first level degree, the performance in the previous schooling career, etc. in order to provide mover or stayer profiles of Southern bachelors.