The choice to enrol in a small university: A case study of Piemonte Orientale
Tiziana Caliman (tiziana.caliman@gmail.com) and
Alberto Cassone (alberto.cassone@uniupo.it)
POLIS Working Papers from Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS
Abstract:
In the recent past, expectations concerning universities have emphasised their active role in enhancing economic and regional development. The universities in geographical areas suffering from structural problems are particularly required to play this role. Moreover, the correlation between the socioeconomic status (and the education) of parents and that of their adult offspring is positive and significant, in both the statistical and practical senses. This paper investigates the experience of a small Italian University (Piemonte Orientale 'Amedeo Avogadro'), in order to evaluate its role in human capital accumulation, necessary to economic development. The aim of this article is to verify whether this small university satisfies a specific demand which would never be satisfied by a larger university. We found important role of small Universities in the human capital accumulation in the recruitment basin, a phenomenon with medium and long term implications. The empirical results show that the representative graduate student of Piemonte Orientale is characterized by modest parental socioeconomic conditions and education. Its demographic recruitment basin is a specific and well defined geographical area. These factors have a positive impact on the choice of enrolment (Piemonte Orientale versus other Universities). The choice is modelled by a probit (logit) binary outcomes model using the Almalaurea cross-section sample on graduates in year 2008. We also update the dataset and re-estimate the models in order to verify the robustness of empirical results and to identify changes in the representative student, using the Almalaurea cross-section sample on graduates for year 2010. The crucial role of the modest socioeconomic background and the low mobility of the students are confirmed. The 2010 analysis does not confirm a result for year 2008, i.e. that a poor performance in secondary school increases the probability to choose Piemonte Orientale vs larger and well established universities: the result underlines a positive evolution of this small university recruitment performance.
Keywords: Performance; Human Capital Accumulation; Small Universities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I21 I23 R00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse and nep-edu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dCl0rhijD36igZqm6 ... af7/view?usp=sharing (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uca:ucapdv:173
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in POLIS Working Papers from Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucia Padovani (lucia.padovani@sp.unipmn.it).