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Socio-Economic Determinants of Student Mobility and Inequality of Access to Higher Education in Italy

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Abstract

This paper introduces a modified version of the Hansen-gravity model as a framework to estimate the accessibility of higher education (HE) institutions in Italy from equal opportunities perspective. The fundamental assumption underlying gravity models is that accessibility decreases with spatial distance from opportunities. The paper extends the gravity equation to include socio-economic factors influencing the access to HE. The findings reveal differences in response to quality and other institutional characteristics by parental background and gender. Finally, decomposition of overall inequality into spatial and aspatial components reveals both the physical and social distance between groups of students seeking higher education opportunities in the country.

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Notes

  1. With Ki the model becomes production-constrained. The choice of this model is justified by the fact that most of the programmes are provided in an open-access fashion in Italy. Therefore, theoretically, students are free to choose any destination desired hence the model is not constrained by destination (not attraction constrained) but to make sure that the number of trips produced by an origin does not exceed the number of residents, the model is constrained from the production side. For the formal development see Wilson (1971).

  2. source: www.anagrafe.miur.it

  3. source: http://elezionistorico.interno.gov.it

  4. source: http://dati.beniculturali.it/datasets/luoghi-della-cultura

  5. see Flowerdew and Aitkin (1982) and Smith (1987) for theoretical development.

  6. The probability mass function of flows is given by \(Pr(T_{ij})=\frac {\exp ^{-N_{ij}}N_{ij}^{T}{ij}}{T_{ij}!}\).

  7. see Dennett (2012) for details.

  8. Mean Logarithmic Deviation is a path-independent decomposable inequality measure (Foster and Shneyerov 2000). It is defined as: \(MLD(X)=\frac {1}{N}{{\sum }_{1}^{N}}{\ln {\frac {\mu _{x}}{x_{i}}}}\) where X is a distribution, N population size and μX is mean.

  9. There were 60 universities and fewer places and sites available to students source:La localizzazione geografica degli atenei statali e non statali in Italia dal 1980 al 2000, 2001.

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  1. Department of Economics, Abdullah Gül University, Sumer Campus, Kayseri, Turkey

    Umut Türk

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  1. Umut Türk
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Appendix

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Table 6 Results of poisson regression model 2
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Türk, U. Socio-Economic Determinants of Student Mobility and Inequality of Access to Higher Education in Italy. Netw Spat Econ 19, 125–148 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-019-09445-w

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