Pull factors for university students’ mobility: a gravity model approach

Migration phenomena are characterised by flows that are typically multilateral. Often an outgoing flow corresponds to one or more incoming flows, which counterbalances it. When the balance is negative, socio-economic problems can arise. Italy has been afflicted for years by a particular type of unilateral migration: student mobility. Thousands of students leave the South to study in the Centre-North, driven by the better socio-economic conditions of those areas, and by more prosperous job prospects. Since this flow is not followed by a return one, nor by other incoming flows, the historical, socio-economic gap between North and South is widened. Taking advantage of the big dataset concernin…

Predicting in-hospital mortality from Coronavirus Disease 2019: A simple validated app for clinical use

Backgrounds Validated tools for predicting individual in-hospital mortality of COVID-19 are lacking. We aimed to develop and to validate a simple clinical prediction rule for early identification of in-hospital mortality of patients with COVID-19. Methods and findings We enrolled 2191 consecutive hospitalized patients with COVID-19 from three Italian dedicated units (derivation cohort: 1810 consecutive patients from Bergamo and Pavia units; validation cohort: 381 consecutive patients from Rome unit). The outcome was in-hospital mortality. Fine and Gray competing risks multivariate model (with discharge as a competing event) was used to develop a prediction rule for in-hospital mortality. D…

The routes of Southern Italy university students: an explorative analysis

The neoclassical migration approach postulates that different conditions in labour markets among territories are the driving forces behind migration. On the other hand, exponents of the new economics of migration argue that the decision to move is not made at the individual level. Considering migration as the result of a decision taken within a social network helps to explain the so-called chain migration. In this paper, we pay attention to the migratory chain of university students. This work introduces a statistical technique to “classify” migratory chains of students living in Sicily, Sardinia or Apulia, and enrolled in some centre-north regions from 2008 to 2017.

Analisi della predittività dei test d’accesso per Economia

Questo lavoro sulla predittività dei test di accesso TOLC-E e TOLC-I si inserisce, a pieno titolo, in due progetti di ricerca promossi da alcuni autori di questo rapporto. Il primo, del 2016, è il “Protocollo di Ricerca per lo studio della mobilità universitaria (MS) e delle carriere universitarie” tra gli atenei di Palermo, Napoli Federico II, Firenze, Torino, Cagliari, Sassari e Siena e il Miur. Il secondo è un Progetto di Rilevanza Nazionale 2017HBTK5P dal titolo “From high school to job placement: micro-data life course analysis of university student mobility and its impact on the Italian North-South divide”, linea Sud, finanziato nel 2019 con la partecipazione degli atenei sottoscritto…

Student mobility: A systemic approach to preferential patterns in higher education

The thesis is a collection of three essays with a “fil rouge”, namely the study of Italian student mobility, 2008 to 2017, analyzed systemically. The main objective of the thesis is to develop statistical methods suitable to identifying preferential mobility patterns starting from the micro-data of a mobility network and applying these methods to reveal preferential patterns of mobility among Italian students with a particular focus on students from Sicily. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that chain migration, within the framework of a network analysis, has been applied to the study of Italian student mobility. In each of the three chapters, there are data analysis tool…

L'isola che se ne va

Le università rivestono un ruolo fondamentale per un territorio, oltre ad essere un luogo di alta formazione e quindi di creazione di capitale umano, la letteratura ha evidenziato che tali istituzioni attraverso il knowledge spillover possono talvolta rappresentare il motore dell’innovazione e quindi dello sviluppo economico (Wolfe 2005). Nonostante queste importanti funzioni, per garantirsi le risorse necessarie a portare avanti la propria attività le università italiane hanno un crescente bisogno di sviluppare la propria capacità di allargare il bacino di attrazione degli studenti, in quanto: i) parte della quota base del Fondo di Funzionamento Ordinario (FFO) ricevuta dal Ministero dell’…

Appendice A

Questo lavoro sulla predittività dei test di accesso TOLC-E e TOLC-I si inserisce, a pieno titolo, in due progetti di ricerca promossi da alcuni autori di questo rapporto. Il primo, del 2016, è il “Protocollo di Ricerca per lo studio della mobilità universitaria (MS) e delle carriere universitarie” tra gli atenei di Palermo, Napoli Federico II, Firenze, Torino, Cagliari, Sassari e Siena e il Miur. Il secondo è un Progetto di Rilevanza Nazionale 2017HBTK5P dal titolo “From high school to job placement: micro-data life course analysis of university student mobility and its impact on the Italian North-South divide”, linea Sud, finanziato nel 2019 con la partecipazione degli atenei sottoscritto…

Assessing mental health therapeutic communities functioning

Empirical and clinical evidence shows that therapeutic communities produce changes in people’s mental health and well-being. Treatment in communities has effects on improving interpersonal relationships, acceptance among members, ability to recognize other people’s feelings, symptomatology, life satisfaction and self-esteem. This paper aims to investigate which factors can explain the treatment effectiveness, measured by an index which incorporates the point of view of the communities staff members, by means of a beta regression model with random intercept. The results show the influence of some organizational dimension as well as staff roles, providing a meaningful insights into the functi…

Personality correlates of gaslighting behaviours in young adults

This study focused on gaslighting, a specific type of psychological violence occurring in intimate relationships, where one partner displays controlling behaviours towards the other. The aim of the research was to analyse the association between gaslighting behaviours and dysfunctional personality domains of both abusers and survivors, respectively assessed through the PID-5-IRF and the PID-5-BF. A group of 250 young adults (males=124), aged 18–30 years (M=22.99, SD= 3.02), took part in this study. Our results showed that (a) for abusers, detachment, disinhibition and psychoticism were positively associated with gaslighting behaviours, and (b) for survivors, antagonism, disinhibition and ps…

Appendice C

Questo lavoro sulla predittività dei test di accesso TOLC-E e TOLC-I si inserisce, a pieno titolo, in due progetti di ricerca promossi da alcuni autori di questo rapporto. Il primo, del 2016, è il “Protocollo di Ricerca per lo studio della mobilità universitaria (MS) e delle carriere universitarie” tra gli atenei di Palermo, Napoli Federico II, Firenze, Torino, Cagliari, Sassari e Siena e il Miur. Il secondo è un Progetto di Rilevanza Nazionale 2017HBTK5P dal titolo “From high school to job placement: micro-data life course analysis of university student mobility and its impact on the Italian North-South divide”, linea Sud, finanziato nel 2019 con la partecipazione degli atenei sottoscritto…

A network analysis of student mobility patterns from high school to master’s

Human migration involves the movement of people from one place to another. An example of undirected migration is Italian student mobility where students move from the South to the Center-North. This kind of mobility has become of general interest, and this work explores student mobility from Sicily towards universities outside the island. The data used in this paper regards six cohorts of students, from 2008/09 to 2013/14. In particular, our goal is to study the 3-step migration path: the area of origin (Sicilian provinces), the regional university for the bachelor’s degree, and the regional university for the master’s. Our analysis is conducted by building a multipartite network with four …

A new measure for the attitude to mobility of Italian students and graduates: a topological data analysis approach

AbstractStudents’ and graduates’ mobility is an interesting topic of discussion especially for the Italian education system and universities. The main reasons for migration and for the so called brain drain, can be found in the socio-economic context and in the famous North–South divide. Measuring mobility and understanding its dynamic over time and space are not trivial tasks. Most of the studies in the related literature focus on the determinants of such phenomenon, in this paper, instead, combining tools coming from graph theory and Topological Data Analysis we propose a new measure for the attitude to mobility. Each mobility trajectory is represented by a graph and the importance of the…

Appendice B

Questo lavoro sulla predittività dei test di accesso TOLC-E e TOLC-I si inserisce, a pieno titolo, in due progetti di ricerca promossi da alcuni autori di questo rapporto. Il primo, del 2016, è il “Protocollo di Ricerca per lo studio della mobilità universitaria (MS) e delle carriere universitarie” tra gli atenei di Palermo, Napoli Federico II, Firenze, Torino, Cagliari, Sassari e Siena e il Miur. Il secondo è un Progetto di Rilevanza Nazionale 2017HBTK5P dal titolo “From high school to job placement: micro-data life course analysis of university student mobility and its impact on the Italian North-South divide”, linea Sud, finanziato nel 2019 con la partecipazione degli atenei sottoscritto…

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

The most important student mobility (SM) flow in Italy 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 enrollment and students' personal records for three cohorts of freshmen, in order to investigate preferential patterns of SM from Sicily toward universities in other regions. Our main goal is to reveal the existence of chain migrations, where students from a particular geographical area move towards a particular destination to follow other students that have previously moved. The paper provides aspects that are innova…

Exploring drivers for Italian university students’ mobility: first evidence from AlmaLaurea data.

This article is part of a national Project aimed at studying Italian university students’ mobility. The novelty proposed here lies in the use, for the first time, of individual data from the census surveys that the Alma Laurea consortium conducts on all Italian graduates. The advantage of this data consists of information that was previously unavailable. For example, information about the socio-economic conditions of the students’ parents, satisfaction with the Bachelor’s degree course and university services, and employment status recorded 1, 3, and 5 years after graduation. Here we report the first analyses conducted on the data relating to the University of Palermo Bachelors who enrolled…

A new bipartite matching approach for record linkage: the case of two big Italian databases

In recent years, university student mobility in Italy has worsened the north-south economic divide. Therefore, studying this phenomenon and its determinants is necessary to provide helpful information to support socio-economic policies. Thus, this paper aims at integrating two big databases about university students in Italy: the first one is provided by the Ministry of University and Research, concerning the university careers of student cohorts; the second one is provided by the AlmaLaurea consortium, concerning the university experiences of graduates and their success in the labour market. Both databases contain socio-demographic information that complements each other. The proposed meth…

L’aumento degli immatricolati nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia nell’anno accademico 2020-21: merito del Covid?