The choice of field of study at the tertiary level: the analytic approach of mapping 2.0 and main results

This paper presents the main results from a survey highlighting the stu-dents’ decision-making process at the end of upper secondary education, showing the propensities toward those continuing their studies at the ter-tiary level in the various subject fields and displaying the baskets of uni-versity choices. The aim is to reconstruct the network of future propensi-ties among the various university fields of studies using Social Network Analysis, from data collected by the Mapping technique (Giancola et al., 2023). To achieve the goals, we developed a survey conducted between March and May 2023, in the city of Rome and the Lazio region. We col-lected 1953 cases of students who decide to pursue their studies at the tertiary level, from a total sample of 2860 respondents. The results sup-port the validity of the technique in representing the distinct effects of as-criptive factors (e.g., social origin, gender) and school career variables (e.g., academic track choices) on decision-making. The power of inertia of ascriptive variables seems to be reconfirmed in both the decision to pur-sue university studies and among the various fields of tertiary study.