Measuring territory student-attractiveness in Italy. Longitudinal evidence

The aim of this paper is to investigate the factors affecting university student mobility in Italy in a longitudinal perspective, by considering the flows across competing territorial areas supplying tertiary education programs. The Bradley-Terry modelling approach based on pair comparisons has been adopted to define the attractiveness of competing territories and a range of determinants related to the socio-economic characteristics of the areas as well as universities’ resources. Data released by the Italian Ministry of Education (MiUR) are analysed for the academic years 2010/2011-2014/2015. The modelling approach considers score values for each territory and year, allowing to evaluate whether attractiveness improves or deteriorates over time, and to rank areas according to their attractiveness. To this end, an index based on ranking changes, appropriately weighed with the differences in score values, is proposed. Empirical findings highlight that attractiveness depends not only on the educational programs, but also on territories’ socio-economic factors, reflecting the well-known North-South divide that persists in time.