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Student mobility from the south to the north/centre of Italy is an increasingly crucial topic because the most important consequence is the continual depletion of universities situated in the southern regions. Using micro-data from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), the purpose of this paper is to investigate how contextual factors affect this mobility.

Empirical evidence is provided by developing a multilevel logit model of student decisions to move at university enrolment that allows us to identify the unique effects that student and province characteristics have on out-migration. Multilevel analysis is appropriate because the research questions focus on the role of province characteristics, variables that are measured at the macro level, on student-level outcome (out-migration) while controlling for student-level characteristics, variables that are measured at the micro level.

The present paper intends to contribute to the literature by quantifying the way in which contextual factors affect student mobility from the south to the north/centre of Italy. Findings show that province differences remain significant even after controlling for individual characteristics stressing the importance of the geographical dimension for student mobility. These findings have important policy implications for the future of university system in Italy.

This paper is relevant to the literature concerning this issue because most of the empirical applications are based on spatial models that do not take into account individual characteristics of the students. In addition, the multilevel methodology proposed can be easily generalise to other countries.