ATTRACTIVENESS OF UNIVERSITY DEGREE PROGRAMS: A SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

The National (Italian) Register of Students and Graduates (Anagrafe Nazionale Studenti - ANS, in Italian) is an administrative database, established by the Law 170 of 2003 and implemented by the Ministerial Decree 9 of 2004. The aim of this database consists in registering and monitoring the university students enrolled in a degree course. Administrative data (e.g., data about personal characteristics, high school, and students’ academic career) is monthly collected from all Italian public and private universities, through an online platform. The ANS database represents a relevant support instrument that is used by local (e.g., universities) and national (e.g., MIUR, ANVUR) decision makers to monitor and evaluate the Italian degree courses. In particular, data from ANS allows the analysis of the national and international mobility of students as well as the choices made by freshmen in terms of degree programs. The aim of this paper is the analysis of students’ migratory movements among universities in order to provide a measurement of the attractiveness of the universities’ teaching offer, with a special focus on the masters degree programs. After the bachelor degree, do didactic fields exist where the propensity to move towards a different university is particularly high? Moreover, is this propensity affected by universities’ characteristics (e.g., dimension, geographical area)? What are the most attractive universities for each didactic field? The study would answer to these questions applying Social Network Analysis to ANS data related with the enrollments to masters by students that completed the bachelor degree program.