Multimode Networks for the Analysis of Italian Student Mobility Flows in Higher Education.

Giancarlo Ragozini , University of Naples Federico II
Maria Prosperina Vitale, University of Salerno
Giuseppe Giordano, University of Salerno

The Italian student mobility in higher education represents an emerging issue for the academic system, especially for the regions located in Southern Italy. Indeed, such mobility generates massive student flows from the South to the North of the country. This phenomenon yields a brain-drain and a weakening of the human capital in this area. In the case of master degree programs, the mobility is even more consistent. The determinants of the student mobility are of various types. Several classifications have been proposed in the literature taking into account economic, social, cultural, institutional and organizational factors. In the present contribution we aim at exploring the student mobility flows among Italian geographical areas by defining networks in which regions (as well as Provinces or Universities) represent the set of nodes and student exchanges between units represent the set of links between them. Moving from this theoretical framework, a multimode network perspective is considered. The data on cohorts of students enrolled at the Bachelor and Master Degree of Italian universities are provided by the Italian National Student Archive. Many possible sets of nodes can be derived from this database, such as provinces of student residence, university of enrollment at bachelor level and at master level, and so on. These data structures give rise to multimode networks that could be analyzed by using the approaches proposed in the literature. More specifically, we will explore the use of both community detection algorithms and blockmodeling analysis in order to find homogeneous territorial sub-areas.

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 Presented in Session 61. Skills, Labour Market and Internal Migration