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This paper examines individual and institutional characteristics which may influence the outcomes of university students' careers. Withdrawals, course changes, delays and graduations of students enrolled in first-cycle degree courses in a large public university in Italy are examined. Individual longitudinal data from administrative archives were used, taking into account both the temporal dimension and the organisational and structural characteristics of the degree courses. Results indicate that the profile of a successful student is defined by both socio-demographic factors and pre-university educational experience. At course level, restricted access to courses, study fields and course size were important for students' university careers.

The paper tests longitudinally the hypothesis that educational subcultures in terms of which students interpret their role and their educational setting affect the probability of dropping out of higher education. A logistic regression model was performed to predict drop out at the beginning of the second academic year for the 823 freshmen of a three-year bachelor degree in psychology at an Italian university. The model uses both measures of students' educational subculture and incoming levels of knowledge and skills. The probability of dropping out was used as dependent variable. Results show that the probability of dropping out is significantly associated with students' educational subculture--but not with their incoming level of knowledge and skills. Our results suggest the need to recognize the meaning as a legitimate variable of research and of intervention in the field of educational success.

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 seeks to discover whether the performance of university students has improved in the wake of the changes in higher education introduced by the Bologna Declaration of 1999 and the construction of the European Higher Education Area. A principal component analysis is used to construct a multi-dimensional performance variable called the LEArning Society-adapted Outcome Index. A quantile regression is then applied to ensure that the analysis does not focus solely on average figures, and the performance of students of various types is analyzed. Significant improvements are found in the acquisition of systemic and interpersonal skills and in student satisfaction but not in cognitive aspects. There are improvements in students of all types, but they are smaller among the best students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature has suggested that students' progress at university is influenced by their personal characteristics; this article examines whether these factors act differently according to the study fields of degree courses in which students are enrolled. In particular, the factors influencing the various outcomes of the university programme (withdrawals, course changes, delays, completion of degrees) in three-year degree courses in a large Italian university are analysed from the perspective of study fields. The authors examined the records of over 32,000 students enrolling from academic years 2002/3 to 2005/6 in 84 first-cycle degree courses, grouped in four different fields of study. Analyses were conducted by considering the time dimension within the methodological approach of survival analysis, by means of individual longitudinal data from university administrative archives. A discrete-time method for competing risks event history analysis was applied to study the determinants of university outcomes in the various fields of study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]