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We use detailed survey data linked to administrative records from secondary schools in England to investigate potential channels contributing to the socio-economic gap in post-compulsory educational aspirations. We investigate the role of experiences and attitudes including the provision of information, advice and guidance (IAG), bullying victimisation, locus of control and self-perception of academic potential. Our findings indicate a significant socio-economic gap in aspirations to stay in education, to follow the academic rather than the vocational route, and to attend university. We use decomposition analysis to show that the experiences we consider are not statistically correlated with the observed socio-economic gap while differences in attitudes explain up to 22% of the effect. The findings suggest that investing in self-esteem building and attribution training programmes within schools could contribute to equalising educational outcomes.

With its combination of online and face-to-face interaction, blended learning is increasingly being employed in postgraduate education. To date, most empirical research on the topic has focused on the design and relative effectiveness of online versus in-person learning. Meanwhile, any exploration of the costs of its delivery has often been neglected. In this study, we propose a framework to assess the costs and cost-effectiveness of alternative designs of blended postgraduate programs, and then empirically apply it to an innovative blended Master of Business Administration (MBA) course as compared with similar MBAs taught at the same institution, with the differences lying in their proportions of online content and the intensity of their use. We applied the Community of Inquiry framework to show that the program with the most intensive use of online learning is also the most effective in terms of student cognitive gain. However, it is not the most cost-effective when compared to other, less online-intensive alternatives. We also found that this result depends on the scalability constraints imposed by the design of the programs. The implications of the scalability versus the quality versus the costs of blended education are then discussed.

Given the expected advantages for individuals and societies, financial literacy is high on the policy agenda in many countries. This paper reports the results from a unique survey conducted on a sample of 13-16-year-old students in five European countries, aimed at measuring and comparing their level of financial literacy skills. The results indicate significant differences in the level of financial literacy across countries that are interpreted in the light of the differences in the countries' educational policies and experiences with financial education. The findings suggest that supra-national coordinated action is needed to guarantee better financial knowledge and safeguard economic stability in future crises.

This paper combines a theoretical-based model with a data-driven approach to develop an Early Warning System that detects students who are more likely to dropout. The model uses innovative multilevel statistical and machine learning methods. The paper demonstrates the validity of the approach by applying it to administrative data from a leading Italian university.

The current study assesses the effect of using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with the specific goal of providing remedial education. The data refer to an Italian flagship university, Politecnico di Milano, where a MOOC platform was launched following the strategy 'MOOCs to bridge the gaps'. Hence, the study aims at assessing the effect of students completing a MOOC taken as a foundation course in physics on their ability to pass the subsequent on-campus exam in physics (N = 2,830). The research used Propensity Score Matching (PSM), basing the propensity scores on personal and academic information about the students. The results show that completers are 7 to 16 percentage points more likely to pass the related exam than the other students enrolled in the same MOOCs. These findings support the idea that using MOOCs for remedial purposes is effective in terms of student achievement within a formal education context.

The paper revisits the outbreak of COVID-19 in Italy and particularly in Lombardy region, the first and initially most severely affected area among western countries. First, we provide an overview of the impact of the pandemic in the country and in the region, mentioning the turning points and the main effects on the national and local economy. Second, we focus on the impact in the educational sector, by describing an overview of the university's activities and reporting the actions undertaken by our home university, Politecnico di Milano, a technological university located in Milan (Lombardy region). We report the activities during the three main stages of the pandemic: the reaction, the management of the emergency and the planning of the new normality. Finally, we provide considerations on the main elements emerging from our commentary, showing the prominent roles of governance and communication in ensuring continuity for students, support for faculty and the redesign of services for the administrative staff. A student-centric approach and a high engagement of the entire community are the main elements that brought together the organisation to face the emergency and plan for the future, where the digital and physical layers coexists.

This paper assesses the effect of need-based grants on the performance of university students in Italy. We performed a series of between-universities and within-universities propensity score matching analyses to evaluate the effect of grants on several student performance indicators, such as dropout rate, first year credits and efficiency of study. Our findings suggest that financial aid has a positive, substantial and statistically robust effect on university students' performance and on if and when they complete their undergraduate degree courses. The positive impact is heterogeneous across universities, while few differences were detected for subgroups of students. Reinforcing financial aid policies can simultaneously help disadvantaged students and improve overall academic performance in Italian universities.

Purpose: This research investigates the impact of managerial practices implemented by Italian school principals on students' outcomes, using micro-data provided by the National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI) for 2013/14 school year. Design/methodology/approach: Employing an educational production function, the authors regress a set of student and school's characteristics, enriched by information from a questionnaire filled by school principals to estimate student's score at grade 8 (last year of junior secondary school), also taking into account student's prior achievement (at grade 6 -- first year of junior secondary school). Findings: Indicators about managerial practices have positive coefficients, but low statistical significance. Stronger associations between management variables and test scores are detected for low-SES schools. Originality/value: The research presented here is particularly innovative in the Italian context, where little evidence exists about the impact of managerial skills in education, though institutional reforms are leading towards a strengthening of school principal's leadership role. In this paper, the authors move a first step by describing managerial practices and their diffusion in different schools and geographical areas within the country. The authors focus the attention on the role of managerial practices (what principals do) and not on the managerial skills (what principals are able to do).

In this paper, we have employed data from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 2012 edition) on the EU-15 countries in order to investigate the effect of using ICT at home on achievement. By employing Propensity Score Matching, we provide robust evidence that in most countries there is a negative association between using computers intensely for homework and achieving lower test scores across all subjects. Such negative effect affects the achievement of both low- and high-performing students and is robust to a specification that consider unobservable self-sorting of students across schools. Our findings suggest that a more cautious approach should be taken with regards to the wide-spread use of digital innovation as a means to support students' out-of-school work.

This study investigates the existence of various leadership types in a sample of lower secondary school principals across Italy (n = 1073). Information is obtained using a questionnaire about instructional practices and leadership perceptions administered by the National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI). Employing a latent class analysis (LCA) for the specification of the educational production function (EPF), we identify three subgroups of school leaders: "educative leaders" (49% of the total sample), who support school improvement that utilises teachers' skills; "leaders who teach" (35%), who are actively present in the classroom; and "transactional leaders" (16%), who support the school and balance various viewpoints. We then analyse the data to ascertain if some principals' individual characteristics and school context factors are statistically correlated with the probability of having certain leadership attitudes. Finally, we provide evidence that schools with 'leaders who teach' report lower academic test scores; this third step is novel as few previous studies have attempted to link leadership styles and test scores. However, the difference in test scores across groups disappears when the geographical factor is accounted for, pointing to the importance of contextual factors in that they affect both leadership types and educational outcomes.

The economic impact of resource investments into higher education has been the focus of considerable research in recent years. Many contributions analyse the strength of the connection between economic development and higher education at the local level and the conditions which make certain systems more effective and efficient than others. In this paper, we provide a systematic bibliometric review of the available literature on the subject, various dimensions of this complex issue, constructing and analysing a map of variables used by selected researchers in the field. A summary of knowledge gaps, research limitations, topics explored and applied methods is provided to envisage future research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the effect of orientation advice (OA), which is an instrument aimed at supporting pupils during their first transition from middle to high school. We investigate whether being 'ambitious' (i.e. rejecting OA and choosing a more challenging track) influences grade 9 retention probability. Data from 28 schools from Piacenza (Italy) are combined with those of the Italian National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI). Employing the propensity score matching method, we find that being 'ambitious' increases the probability of grade 9 retention by 10–15%. Moreover, making an ambitious choice is riskier for males, non-Italian and socioeconomically advantaged students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper derives efficiency scores for around 8,500 schools in 30 countries, using Programme for International Student Assessment 2012 data and a nonparametric approach called data envelopment analysis as method. On average, achievement scores of schools can be increased by 27%, holding inputs constant. Efficiency scores vary considerably both between and within countries; the role of managerial efficiency and structural differences due to operating in different contexts (countries) is disentangled. Subsequently, a number of school-level factors are found to be correlated with efficiency scores and indicate potential directions for improving educational results. Heterogeneity of such characteristics across countries and along the distribution of efficiency is explored.

This study employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate relative efficiency of a sample of 54 Italian and 30 Polish public universities for the period between 2001 and 2011. The examination is conducted in two steps: first unbiased DEA efficiency scores are estimated and then are regressed on external variables to quantitatively asses the direction and magnitude of the impact of potential determinants. The analysis shows the strong heterogeneity in the efficiency scores within each country, more pronounced than the difference in average efficiency scores between countries. There is evidence that efficiency is determined by revenues’ and academic staff’s structure: competitive versus non-competitive resources, and the number of professors among academic staff. The study also explores the variation of efficiency and productivity over time, and reveals that while pure efficiency change was similar between the two countries, the efficiency frontier improved more in Italy than in Poland.

In Italy, parents are free to choose the primary school for their children without restrictions imposed by catchment areas. This freedom of choice, inspired by quasi‐market mechanisms, aims to foster competition between schools and raise educational standards. Analysing the case of Milan using regression models and administrative data for the 2015–16 school year, we study the factors associated with the probability that parents choose a school different from the one closest to where they live. We focus on both push factors (the characteristics of local schools) and pull factors (the features of chosen schools). The findings indicate that parents select schools which have a lower proportion of immigrant pupils and higher socio‐economic status of the student body. On the other hand, school performance in standardised tests is not statistically associated with parents' decisions to opt out of local schools, nor does it emerge as a feature of the schools most likely to attract non‐local students after accounting for the socio‐economic composition of school intake. The resulting picture shows that affluent Italian parents implement avoidance strategies to avoid schools attended by a high proportion of immigrant or lower‐class students—with the potential of fostering segregation and concentrations of disadvantaged groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how knowledge transfer (KT) indicators affect analyses on efficiency in the Higher Education sector, taking into account the characteristics of the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). After revising the concept of third mission as a field for data development and its importance in assessing university performance, we applied various data envelopment analysis models with different specifications to 47 Spanish public universities to test whether KT indicators are relevant when evaluating the performance of HEIs in terms of their efficiency and, if so, which indicators are most suitable. Our results suggest that the effect of including KT indicators in the efficiency analyses varies from university to university according to their characteristics. The subject mix taught at the university, the focus according to each mission's relative importance within the total range of activities carried out in each university (mission mix), and the mix of their third mission activities affect the increase of the universities' efficiency scores when KT is taken into account in the analysis. This means that these factors affect the universities' position for the different efficiency scores.

This paper estimates technical efficiency scores across the community college sector in the United States. Using stochastic frontier analysis and data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System for 2003-2010, we estimate efficiency scores for 950 community colleges and perform a series of sensitivity tests to check for robustness. We find that community colleges have become more efficient over time, but no evidence of economies of scale. We also find significant variation in efficiency across colleges, with only part of this variation explained by exogenous differences by state and across student characteristics.

Study success in Higher Education is of primary importance in the European policy agenda. Yet, given the diverse educational landscape across countries and institutions, more coordinated action is needed to gain a more solid knowledge of the dropout phenomenon. This study aims to gain a better insight into students' dropout based on an integrated comparative study of two universities located in two different European countries: Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands). This research aims at assessing whether the factors affecting dropout are similar in the Italian and the Dutch contexts by testing the predictive capacity of ad-hoc models trained in other university-country settings at three different stages of the student's university journey: (i) enrolment, (ii) end of the first semester, and (iii) end of the first year. Results show that the predictive capacity of models is exchangeable across different contexts, and it improves dramatically once data on university performance becomes available. We find that the models trained in the Dutch context have a better ability to identify dropouts in the Italian context than the other way around. Models trained on Dutch data allow us to better understand the relationship between educational credits obtained, the most important variable across models, and students' dropout. This study contributes to creating a European common arena for discussing Higher Education success issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we estimate the effect of receiving financial aid for a cohort of students who enrolled at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in the year 2007/2008, through a propensity score matching approach. Using administrative data about these students for four years, the impact of the financial aid on several dimensions of academic performance was evaluated: formative credits obtained after one year, dropout probability in the first and second year, graduation in the legal duration of the course, and graduation after four years. Overall, a positive and statistically significant effect of the grant is found and this finding is stable across several robustness checks. Exploring the heterogeneity of this effect, it is demonstrated that the effect is higher for immigrants, Italians who moved from another region for studying, and students attending an engineering course. Evidence that unobservable factors (such as students' own intrinsic academic motivation) account for an important part of the estimated impact of the financial aid is also found.

This paper analyses the relationship between the public funding systems of higher education in Italy and the Netherlands and their universities' performances. Empirically, an efficiency analysis on 13 Dutch and 58 Italian public universities is conducted. The findings show that the relative efficiency of Italian and Dutch universities is strongly influenced by the policy perspective adopted. If the goal is to realise the European goals and minimise resources employed for obtaining a high number of graduates, Dutch universities turn out to be more efficient. However, Italian universities are much more efficient if the priority is to minimise the costs for a given level of activity, such as number of students.