Assessing the effects of local contexts on the mobility choices of university students in Campania region in Italy

The mobility of university students in Italy has been framed as a phenomenon linked to so-called intellectual migrations and as a subset of the historical and consolidated internal migration path explained in terms of South–North trajectory. This study describes the most important mobility trajectories of students across macro-areas and disciplinary fields, and then evaluates, using a multilevel logistic regression model, the factors that encouraged student cohort, who were enrolled in a degree program in the academic years 2014–2015, to move elsewhere from the Campania region. Beyond fixed and interaction effects related to the students’ personal characteristics, the model included possible random effects linked to the high schools attended by the students to capture the possible influence of the local context on migration choices.