From high school to job placement: micro-data life course analysis of university student mobility and its impact on the Italian NorthSouth divide

The main objective of this project is the analysis of student mobility from the southern parts of Italy to the central-northern regions. These flows are interrelated to the historical economic North-South divide, which has increased since the 1990s. The project is based on the recent access that the Ministry of Education has granted to the national micro-level longitudinal data on university student careers from 2008 to 2017. The objectives are two-fold: to trace student trajectories from high school to job placement (we will link the university student careers database with the Almalaurea job placement database) and to study the relationship between student university flows and government funding mechanisms, such as the quasi-market allocation system introduced in the 1990s. The main expected results are: the construction of probability mobility profiles of graduates in terms of, for example, degree completion, fields of study, and performance; the description of push and pull factors that lie beyond mobility, a network representation of Universities in terms of their attractiveness, and the identification of the driving factors of university performance and attractiveness with respect to student mobility.