Exploring the Effect of Individual Characteristics and Social mechanisms on Educational Choices

A large body of researches in both economics and sociology has focused on peer effects in education highlighting as social interactions at primary and secondary levels school affect student outcomes (Coleman et al., 1966; Sacerdote, 2011; Patacchini et al., 2017), aspirations and expectations among adolescents (Raabe and Wölfer, 2019; Lorenz et al., 2020), and secondary school-related choices (Zwier et al., 2023). At university context, peer effects resulting from interactions between students are mainly investigated to explore their effect on academic performance (Winston and Zimmerman, 2004; Griffith and Rask, 2014; Vitale et al., 2016). To the best of our knowledge, studies on university choices have paid little attention to the peer environment (Porcu et al., 2022; Usala et al., 2023 and references therein). Within this study, we examine how individuals’ educational choices in tertiary education dependent on socio-demographic background, the family context, the school environment, and social interactions among peers. Starting from these dimensions, it is important to understand the factors playing a critical role within a perspective where the quality of educational systems can occur only within a scenario of non-reproduction of social inequalities. How and which these contextual effects can interact in the individual choice’s process from high school to university is investigated by data gathered through ad hoc surveys. Data integration procedures are adopted to reconstruct a unique dataset of around 4000 students who have participated to three surveys devoted to a high schools’ sample in Campania region. Hence, logistic regression models are applied to assess the effect of peers and other contextual variables on the probability to enroll at university in a specific disciplinary field as well as on the probability to move in another region to attend a degree program.