Never leave a job undone. Fuzzy Markov chains for Italian university students’ retention

The remarkable length of stay in the university system of Italian students, compared with their European colleagues, is by and large a reckoned problem, to the point that governmental action has been taken to reduce the issue of long term students. For longer in the shadow, the creeping phenomenon of students prematurely leaving their university paths, the so called students’ retention, has briskly drawn attention as an additional growing theme, the academic governance level still focusing mainly on students dropping out during their first curricular year, rather than the subsequent ones, due to the present public university funding. In the domestic educational system, the completion of a year, in terms of attainment of all the credits in the syllabus, does not represent a prerequisite for the administrative registration to the next year. This paper explores students’ strategies in tackling two undergraduate programmes, as a latent variable in a fuzzy states Markov chains approach, with respect to two former faculties of the University of Milano-Bicocca, with the aim of sketching academic settings where the circular agreement between undergraduates’ strategies and the academic offer leads to a more favorable educational outcome.