Beyond borders: analysis of the students’ mobility flows at Sapienza University of Rome

The promotion of mobility among academic staff and students is one of the main objective of the Bologna Process, a mechanism that has been defined by the European Commission aimed to promote intergovernmental cooperation between the European countries in the field of the higher education. In this respect, according to the last Erasmus+ Annual Report (2019), almost 10 million people enjoyed the Erasmus programme during the last three decades and the increase of this phenomenon has been recorded in all of the European countries. As far as Italy is concerned, in 2018 (year of the last available data), 76.847 participants in 1.055 Italian projects benefited from mobility in higher education, vocational education and training, school education, adult learning and youth for a total grant amount of €147.83 million. Going into detail, the number of incoming students and trainees is increased by 45.8% from academic year 2010/2011 to academic year 2017/2018 while the number of outgoing students and trainees is increased by 75.6%. Starting from this consideration, the purpose of the research is to analyze data about mobility flows (both incoming and outgoing) during the last academic year (2018/2019) at Sapienza University of Rome that, together with Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna and the University of Padua, ranks among the top three Italian sending institutions. Data will be analyzed through the use of the profile analysis which aim is to compare the same dependent variable (that is the opportunity to do a mobility period abroad) between two different groups (students who did the mobility and those who did not) taking into account both demographic variables (i.e., gender, age of the student at the beginning of the experience abroad, institution country) and academic career’s variables (i.e., exams’ marks and the credits obtained).