Abstract
This paper proposes a multiplex network approach to analyze the Italian students’ mobility choices from bachelor’s to master’s degrees. We rely upon administrative data on Italian students’ careers by focusing on those who decide to enroll in a different university for their master’s studies once they graduate in a bachelor’s program. These flows are explored by defining a multiplex network approach where the ISCED-F fields of education and training are the layers, the Italian universities are the nodes, and the weighted and directed links measure the number of students moving between nodes. Network centrality measures and layers similarity indexes are computed to highlight the presence of core universities and verify if the network structures are similar across the layers. The results indicate that each field of study is characterized by its network structure, with the most attractive universities usually located in the Center-North of the country. The community detection algorithm highlights that graduates’ mobility between universities is encouraged by the geographical proximity, with different intensities depending on the field of study.
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Notes
- 1.
The definition of mobility adopted in this paper does not depend on the geographical distance between universities or territorial boundaries. For this reason, the Italian online universities are also included in the analysis.
- 2.
The educational fields are derived according to the ‘International Standard Classification of Education: Fields of education and training’ (ISCED-F) that was developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In this contribution, the following ten broad fields are considered to define the layers of the multiplex network: Agriculture, forestry, fisheries and veterinary (‘Agriculture’); Arts and humanities (‘Arts’); Education; Engineering; manufacturing and construction (‘Engineering’); Health and welfare (‘Health’); Information and Communication Technologies (‘ICTs’); Natural sciences, mathematics and statistics (‘Sciences’); Services, Social sciences, journalism and information (‘Social Sciences’).
- 3.
See Sect. 3 for details on the normalization procedure.
- 4.
Data drawn from the Italian ‘Anagrafe Nazionale della Formazione Superiore’ has been processed according to the research project ‘From high school to the job market: analysis of the university careers and the university North-South mobility’ carried out by the University of Palermo (head of the research program), the Italian ‘Ministero Universitá e Ricerca’, and INVALSI.
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Acknowledgements
This contribution has been supported from Italian Ministerial grant PRIN 2017 “From high school to job placement: micro-data life course analysis of university student mobility and its impact on the Italian North-South divide”, n. 2017HBTK5P—CUP B78D19000180001.
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Primerano, I., Santelli, F., Usala, C. (2022). A Multiplex Network Approach for Analyzing University Students’ Mobility Flows. In: Salvati, N., Perna, C., Marchetti, S., Chambers, R. (eds) Studies in Theoretical and Applied Statistics . SIS 2021. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol 406. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16609-9_6
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