Assessment of the University Reputation Through the Analysis of the Student Mobility

Abstract

In higher education, the mobility of students across a country to take a degree is receiving increasing attention in recent years, mainly because of the effects on the economic development and competitiveness of the territorial areas where universities are located. In Italy, an important source of information is represented by the National Student Registry. Among others, the Registry allows us to analyze the student mobility across the country both at the moment of the first enrollment in a bachelor or 5-years degree program and, then, at the enrollment in a master degree program. In the former case, students may attend university in the area of residence or move somewhere else (first-level mobility); in the latter case bachelor graduates may prosecute the academic career with a master degree in the same university or move in another higher academic institution (second-level mobility). In this contribution we propose a set of instruments to analyze student mobility. These instruments will be applied to the information gathered by the National Student Registry. We first define two indicators of the capability of retention and attraction of students computed at the first- and the second-level mobility; we also illustrate how these indices may be synthesize through a composite indicator and how they can be used to produce a graphical display of the ego-centric network generated by the flow of incoming and outgoing movements. Then, we formulate a gravity model to detect how the mobility is affected by university characteristics, such as quality of structures and quality of life of the territorial area of influence of the university.