Foreign Students in Italian Universities: A Statistical Analysis of the Last Decade

In recent years university students’ mobility has become increasingly important at a national level. It has been the subject of numerous studies on the South-Centre and South-North mobility flows of Italian students who choose university out of their residence region. The aim is twofold: to provide quantitative information on the university enrollment of the foreign students in the Italian universities (the size of the flows of foreign students enrolled at Italian universities, according to some socio-demographic characteristics); to measure the dropout rates and the time taken to obtain the degree comparing to the Italian students. Foreign students (FS) were classified into two groups: students with a high school diploma obtained abroad (i.e., IST international students) and foreign students with a high school diploma obtained in Italy (i.e., SGI second-generation immigrants). The analysis is based on the database ‘Anagrafe Nazionale Studenti’ (ANS) of the MIUR, concerning the careers of the university students enrolled in Italy from 2008/09 to 2017/18 (Mobysu.it). The results show that the IST and SGI enrolled in Italy have increased in the last decade, especially from 2014 to 2017 (+19%), but their presence is still very limited if compared to other European countries: 4.5% in 2011 and 5.3% in 2017. Their university performance is poor with much higher dropout rates than the Italian ones, even if the SGI perform better. Only a small amount of IST and SGI students enroll in Southern universities. Finally, the results confirm that the dramatic dropout rates at university are in line with their performance in the high school.