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Students’ migration mobility is the new form of migration: students migrate to improve their skills and become more valued for the job market. The data regard the migration of Italian Bachelors who enrolled at Master Degree level, moving typically from poor to rich areas. This paper investigates the migration and other possible determinants on the Master Degree students’ performance. The Clustering of Effects approach for Quantile Regression Coefficients Modelling has been used to cluster the effects of some variables on the students’ performance for three Italian macro-areas. Results show evidence of similarity between Southern and Centre students, with respect to the Northern ones.

In recent years, university student mobility in Italy has worsened the north-south economic divide. Therefore, studying this phenomenon and its determinants is necessary to provide helpful information to support socio-economic policies. Thus, this paper aims at integrating two big databases about university students in Italy: the first one is provided by the Ministry of University and Research, concerning the university careers of student cohorts; the second one is provided by the AlmaLaurea consortium, concerning the university experiences of graduates and their success in the labour market. Both databases contain socio-demographic information that complements each other. The proposed method is a modification of the Fellegi-Sunter method, which, from the preliminary outcomes, seems to achieve very satisfactory results.

This article is part of a national Project aimed at studying Italian university students’ mobility. The novelty proposed here lies in the use, for the first time, of individual data from the census surveys that the Alma Laurea consortium conducts on all Italian graduates. The advantage of this data consists of information that was previously unavailable. For example, information about the socio-economic conditions of the students’ parents, satisfaction with the Bachelor’s degree course and university services, and employment status recorded 1, 3, and 5 years after graduation. Here we report the first analyses conducted on the data relating to the University of Palermo Bachelors who enrolled in a Master’s degree course in Italy, studying some of their characteristics and connecting them to their mobility

Migration phenomena are characterised by flows that are typically multilateral. Often an outgoing flow corresponds to one or more incoming flows, which counterbalances it. When the balance is negative, socio-economic problems can arise. Italy has been afflicted for years by a particular type of unilateral migration: student mobility. Thousands of students leave the South to study in the Centre-North, driven by the better socio-economic conditions of those areas, and by more prosperous job prospects. Since this flow is not followed by a return one, nor by other incoming flows, the historical, socio-economic gap between North and South is widened. Taking advantage of the big dataset concerning the cohorts of students enrolling in Italian universities, made available by the Ministry of Education, we adopted the viewpoint of gravity models to investigate the social, economic and educational aspects of universities and destination areas that can make mobility attractive, studying them also over time.

When the variables of interest are measured by a set of items on units having a multilevel setting, conventional structural equation models cannot be used because the assumption of independence of all latent variables and indicators across units is violated due to the within-cluster dependence. In this work we propose the use of parcelling in defining of latent variables of a multilevel structural equation model (MSEM). The paper aims to face the problem of the use of categorical item response data when a multilevel SEM must be applied.

Job market, nowadays, asks for higher and higher skills and competences. Therefore, also the measurement and assessment of the university students performance are crucial issues for policy makers. Although the scientific literature provides several papers investigating the main determinants of university student performance, often results are very different, and they seem to hold just in very specific contexts. This paper aims to contribute to the international literature, focusing on the role of student specific characteristics, supporting the idea that unobservable variables (such as motivation, aptitudes or abilities) should be more investigated.

Investigation about the university student performance, and its measurement, are very crucial issues for any policy maker. Since the economic crisis, jobs market requires even higher skills and competences. Literature offers a lot of papers about the university student quality and performance, in order to identify the main determinants of them. Often, results are very different, and they seems to hold just in a specific context. This paper aims to investigate the role of a latent variable that can take into account the student motivation, aptitude, and abilities, here conveniently called talent. A random effect Quantile Regression on a new measure of Italian student performance has been adopted, and results seem to highlight the main role of the talent.

Summary Aims The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of three different water temperatures on physiological responses (dehydration, sweat rate, urine output, rectal temperature and plasma electrolytes) of competitive athletes during a “simulated” race of 5 km in an indoor swimming pool. Methods Nine male competitive master swimmers swam 5 km with the water at temperatures of 23, 27 and 32 C. Immediately before (Pre) and after (Post) each trial, samples of blood and urine were collected, body weight was recorded and rectal temperature was measured. The dehydration percentage and sweat rate were the highest at 32 C and the lowest at 23 C (23 C: −0.9 ± 0.5; 27 C: −1.3 ± 0.6; 32 C: −2.2 ± 0.7% and 23 C: 0.48 ± 0.28; 27 C: 0.76 ± 0.36; 32 C: 1.25 ± 0.37 l/h). The Post urine volume output was not significantly different in the three trials (23 C: 122.6 ± 62.4; 27 C: 78.2 ± 24.9; 32 C 81.4 ± 37.0 mL). The 27 and 32 C water increased the rectal temperature (Pre: 37.0 ± 0.3; Post: 37.9 ± 0.5 C–Pre: 36.9 ± 0.4; Post: 38.0 ± 0.4 C, respectively). Results This study shows that dehydration, sweat rate and body temperatures simultaneously increase with the rise of water temperature during the shortest open water swimming event distance (5 km) performed at race intensity.

This paper focuses on students credits earning speed over time and its determinants, dealing with the huge percentage of students who do not take the degree within the legal duration in the Italian University System. A new indicator for the performance of the student career is proposed on real data, concerning the cohort of students enrolled at a Faculty of the University of Palermo (followed for 7 years). The new indicator highlights a typical zero-inflated distribution and suggests to investigate the effect of the degree course (DC) change on the student career. A mixed-effect model for overdispersed data is considered, with the aim of taking into account the individual variability as well, due to the longitudinal nature of data. Results show the significant positive effect of the DC change on the student performance.

Introduction The need for performing axillary lymph-node dissection in early breast cancer when the sentinel lymph node (SLN) is positive has been questioned in recent years. The purpose of this study was to identify a low-risk subgroup of early breast cancer patients in whom surgical axillary staging could be avoided, and to assess the probability of having a positive lymph-node (LN). Methods We evaluated the cohort of 612 consecutive women affected by early breast cancer. We considered age, tumor size, histological grade, vascular invasion, lymphatic invasion and cancer subtype (Luminal A, Luminal B HER-2+, Luminal B HER-2−, HER-2+, and Triple Negative) as variables for univariate and multivariate analyses to assess probability of there being a positive SLN o nonsentinel lymph node (NSLN). Chi-square, Fisher's Exact test and Student's t tests were used to investigate the relationship between variables; whereas logit models were used to estimate and quantify the strength of the relationship among some covariates and SLN or the number of metastases. Results A significant positive effect of vascular invasion and lymphatic invasion (odds ratios are 4 and 6), and a negative effect of TN (odds ratios is 10) were noted. With respect to positive NSLN, size alone has a significant (positive) effect on tumor presence, but focusing on the number of metastases, also age has a (negative) significant effect. Conclusion This work shows correlation between subtypes and the probability of having positive SLN. Patients not expressing vascular invasion, lymphatic invasion and, moreover, a triple-negative tumor subtype may be good candidates for breast conservative surgery without axillary surgical staging.