Education and migration: the mobility dynamics of Italian graduates

Abstract

Much is told in the literature about the determinants that lead graduates to migrate. However, it is crucial to understand how these dynamics have changed after the new worldwide financial crisis: nowadays, inequality has increased, and new generations tend to travel much more than the previous ones, being more prone to look for better opportunities in a different city or country. In this paper, after a brief introduction on the importance of the study and of the various research in the field, we present a Probit regression model to explain the most important determinants of graduates’ migration. We found that life experience, family background and economic factors can explain the willingness to move, and that graduates from southern Italy have an extremely higher probability to move to a different geographical area to look for a job, with respect to Italians of northern regions, while the graduation mark does not lead to significant differences in the probability of migrating.