Exploring the Italian student mobility flows in higher education

Understanding the phenomenon of intra-and international student mobility has become of increasing relevance in the organization of tertiary education systems. The aim of the present contribution is to describe the incoming outgoing flows of bachelor and master degree students between territories and universities in a network analysis perspective by using information provided by the Italian National Student Archive on cohorts of students enrolled for the first time at the university in the academic years 2011/12 and 2014/15. More specifically, the 2014/15 student cohort was considered to investigate undergraduate students’ choices, whereas the 2011/12 cohort was selected to follow up master students choices until the academic year 2015/16. The main purposes of our approach are to shed some lights on structural relations among universities and territories and the level of their interaction, and to examine the role played by each university in the national student exchange network.