Student mobility: A systemic approach to preferential patterns in higher education

The thesis is a collection of three essays with a “fil rouge”, namely the study of Italian student mobility, 2008 to 2017, analyzed systemically. The main objective of the thesis is to develop statistical methods suitable to identifying preferential mobility patterns starting from the micro-data of a mobility network and applying these methods to reveal preferential patterns of mobility among Italian students with a particular focus on students from Sicily. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that chain migration, within the framework of a network analysis, has been applied to the study of Italian student mobility. In each of the three chapters, there are data analysis tools on the edge of Statistics and Network Theory to foster theory advancement and new insights into student mobility.