Abstract

University students' mobility has implications for regional development. By attracting students, Universities significantly contribute to enhance regional endowment of a highly skilled workforce and to rise regional GDP by stimulating a number of economic activities linked to the demand for goods and services from students living away from home. But, what if student migration inside a country follows just a unidirectional flow from certain regions towards other ones? More interestingly, why does it happen? This is the case of Italy, where student mobility is characterized by an increasing trend of enrollment by students from the Mezzogiorno regions towards Central-Northern Universities, not offset by a comparable flow in the opposite direction. Even more, students from the South of Italy, who graduate in Centre-North, often do not come back in their region of origin, but they search for occupation in the more developed regions of Centre-North. This selective migration elicits a brain drain from Southern regions; it also causes income transfers in favor of the regions of destination (at least in the measure of the costs of living away from the family of origin). This paper aims at giving evidence on the infra-region Italian students' mobility over the last 13 years.