Analysing the determinants of Italian university student mobility pathways

In this paper, we study the mobility choices of Italian students in their transition from a bachelor’s to a master’s degree level with an added emphasis on their overall mobility pathways. We consider individual data from the Italian National Student Archive on two cohorts of students who were enrolled in the academic years 2011–2012 and 2014–2015. We followed both cohorts in Italian universities for six academic years. This allowed us to depict five different profiles of students, categorise them as stayers vs. movers, and work at two different levels. Logit models were then adopted to study the probability to be in mobility at a master’s level, given that a student had been a stayer at bachelor’s degree, and to assess the effect of the field of study. Apart from individual characteristics, network centrality measures were encompassed in the model to assess the university attractiveness in influencing mobility choices.