University Spatial Competition for Students: The Italian Case

The ability to attract students has become crucial for the sustainability of universities, especially in Southern Europe, where the decrease of governmental funding has been dramatic following the financial crisis. By using a competing destinations model on the student flows to 75 Italian universities in the period 2003–12, and modelling university competition with respect to different market segmentations, the paper provides evidence that Italian universities operated under competition forces in the last decade. Results hold when controlling for universities’ educational offer, trying different definitions of university attractiveness, excluding private academic institutions and limiting the analysis to non-selective courses.