From high school to university: academic intentions and enrolment of foreign students in Italy

This work adopts a longitudinal perspective in analysing the academic intentions and enrolment of foreign students in Italy, by citizenship. Using logistic regression models, we investigate how citizenship is associated with the academic intentions and the transition to university of a national representative cohort of foreign students and their classmates, enrolled in the last year of Italian high school in 2015. We use a unique dataset linking survey data of the “Integration of the second generation”, carried out by Istat in 2015, with administrative data on students’ university enrolment, from the Ministry of University registers. We found higher academic intentions among foreign students, compared to their Italian classmates, with Ecuador and Peru, China and the Philippines showing a higher probability of academic intentions and enrolment than both Italians and the other groups.