Human capital dynamics: the geographical mobility of high-school graduates towards university in Italy

ABSTRACT

The paper studies the geographical mobility of high-school graduates who change their residence to enrol in university in Italy, a country with deep geographical socioeconomic cleavages. While the previous literature has mostly focused on interregional mobility, we define mobility at the provincial level in order to observe both long- and short-distance movements. Our descriptive results show that students’ geographical mobility follows the distribution of universities, while only long-distance mobility follows the socioeconomic cleavages of the country. Our micro-level model shows a positive effect of students’ social class of origin, gender and previous school performance. These effects are stronger in the south, while the effect of social class is the same over geographical areas.

KEYWORDS:

• geographical mobility
• high-school graduates
• geographical distance
• university choice
• Italy
• higher education

JEL:

• I23
• J24

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We relied on ISTAT geographical data, accessible at https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/222527. Distance was computed through GEODIST (Picard, 2010), a STATA package based on Vincenty’s (1975) formula.

2. The data set does not include information on the actual change of the registered residence. However, many mobile students do not change their formal residence during university and remain registered as living with their parents, so that our measure is more reliable than that provided by residential registers.

3. We did not use this control in the models of distance since the push of the local labour market should not affect the choice of the destination once the decision to move has been taken.

4. We used ISTAT residence transfer data (http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx?QueryId=19748). Flows were computed as percentages of the province population.

5. Owing to lack space, we only show results concerning the 2001 survey. Full results, showing the changes over surveys of the maps, are available from the authors upon.