Premise

Definition of movers and stayers. Mover/stayer: individual who enrols at a university outside/inside his/her area of origin. Definition of “area of origin” depends on the specific research questions (based on ad hoc distance measures, regions, macro-areas). Attractiveness is based on the number of movers and it can be graded according to the "distance" between macro-region/region/province of origin and the macro-region/region/province of destination. Definition of hub/authorities. Student mobility establishes a set of networks, e.g., among areas of origin and areas of destination, among areas of origin and universities of destination, among universities of origin and destination. Hubs and authorities are central nodes of the networks. Hubs are areas/universities which point to many areas/universities considered central or important.

Issues at stake

Human and cultural capital, including education and qualifications, can be considered a relevant resource to create innovation and development. Despite the significant increase in university graduates from the 1950s to the 2000s, Italy is among the poorest performing countries within EU. Although university enrolment has been increasing in northern and central universities in the last three years, this is due, in part, from increased student migration from southern regions. These tendencies, which have remained unabated, operate in the context of educational inequalities, among individuals of different socio-economic backgrounds and among geographical areas. Territorial inequalities in Italy are strictly related to the well-known North-South divide. Student mobility trajectories seem to reinforce this divide [1]. Mobility is usually an opportunity, but in Italy it is one-directional, that is, from the South to the Centre and North. This strong imbalance between outward and inward flows might therefore have negative consequences on the territories from which students move. The mobility flows show that there exists a university North-South divide too and movers seem to be more favoured in terms of economic and cultural resources than stayers (e.g. there are larger shares of movers among students from lyceums than from technical schools). This process seems to clash with the art.34 of the Italian Constitution, as “Capable and deserving pupils, including those without adequate finances, have the right to attain the highest levels of education”, as some southern students cannot afford living outside the family home. Moreover, this selective process could represent an obstacle to the development of high quality institutions in the areas from which the share of movers is larger. Finally, a crucial issue is the place where students invest their acquired human capital once they graduate. According to survey data, a large proportion of southern graduates, who obtained their degree in the Centre-North, settle in the Centre-North: this points to a substantial “brain-drain” in the South. This effect is compounded by reforms to higher education governance, starting with the university autonomy and, later, with the evaluation system and the introduction of financial additional resources (quota premiale), have been changing the national university “geography” since the last decade, in which the universities mirror the historical Italian North-Centre South divide.

General and specific research questions

• Is it possible to determine a school’s influence on student migration choices? What is more important, the perceived quality of the university more important than exogenous factors (e.g. the quality of life in the town of destination) not under the control of university’s management? Or is it the student socioeconomic and educational background?
• What is the spatial-temporal size of the phenomenon and its characteristics at 1st (BA) and 2nd (MA) level degrees? How do hubs and authorities play a role? What is the geography of movers/attrition rates in terms of gender, location of the high school, type of school, big town/small town, social background, hard and soft sciences?
• What underlies postgraduate mobility? Who returns to their territories of origin and who moves after degree completion?
• What is the profile of the “weak” student, is there a southern “weakness”? How is this related to gender, type of school, social background? Is there a migration chain in the student flows? Are there new universities/new territories more attractive than others?
• Universities are interconnected in a web of relationships of various nature: students move from one university to another; so do researchers and university professors; institutions can be more or less similar by dimension, attractiveness, diversification of degree courses, research/teaching performance, strategy of their governance, or with respect to exogenous factors that characterise geographical position. All these issues will allow to construct a "map" of the Italian university network. These maps will be carried out to answer specific questions: What is the relationship between the network centrality of a university and its attractiveness and performance? Do similar institutions perform similarly? What attributes are better predictors of an institution’s performance? Is there some clear relationship between students' mobility and a university's performance in terms of quality and development strategy? Or do exogenous factors play the major role?
• The newly introduced funding mechanisms and the logic of performance budgeting may well have played a role in shaping the university network. Student mobility is an indirect outcome of such mechanisms, since students can freely choose which the university to enrol in, by selecting the best one since their choices are driven by quality and performance. In this sense students “vote with their feet” and reward universities with an additional share of funds (i.e. the “costo standard”). How much is that amount? How has it changed over time?
• As the MIUR transfers money to the universities just for “regular” students and in-time degree attainments, how much is the financial loss borne by southern universities due to the mobility of the best “performing” students? What is the role of university autonomy and how have universities changed their strategy and business model in response to quasi-market and performance-budgeting mechanisms? Ultimately, has the quasi-market system determined distortions due to "rich gets richer" effects, possibly amplifying a pre-existing divide among institutions (e.g. southern vs northern universities)?