Dropout and Time to Degree in Italian Universities Around the Economic Crisis

In this contribution, we address the following research questions: (i) Do parental education, parental occupation and economic conditions influence the students’ university dropout probability, given students’ previous educational attainment and performance? What is the relative role of these alternative indicators of family background? (ii) Do we observe any changes when comparing different cohorts of entrants – before and after the beginning of the economic crisis – in degree attainment and dropout hazard rates? Can we ascribe these changes to different behavior or to the different composition of the university student body? Is there any evidence that the observed behavioral changes can be ascribed to the economic crisis? To this aim, we use administrative data of the University of Torino – recently integrated with information on parental background – containing detailed information on the academic careers of the cohorts of first enrolled in years 2004-2014. These data include information on transfers to other degree programs within the University of Torino and to other universities, allowing to distinguish between withdrawal from the university system and changes of institution. On research question (i), we find that economic constraints negatively affect the dropout risk, while parental education and occupation seem to exert little further influence. Our findings on research question (ii) indicate that substantial improvements in both dropout probabilities and time to degree have occurred, and that these improvements are partly due to changes in the composition of the student body and partly due to changes in individual behavior.