Continuity and Innovation in Higher Education. A secondary analysis of longitudinal data

The paper presents the results of a research that aims at the evaluation of Italian Higher Education reform policies and their implementation outcomes. It is a secondary analysis of longitudinal administrative data for a description of the phenomena of late performance and student dropping out. Sapienza University of Rome was identified as an ideal context for this analysis, due to its dimensions and complexity, and because of its variety of scientific and educational areas of academic training. The research focuses on the cohorts of students enrolled in specific key moments before (from academic year 1991/1992 to 2000/2001) and after the reform (from 2001/2002 to 2012/2013). The assumption behind this research design is that the longitudinal perspective is able to provide an accurate frame of students’ curricula and to reconstruct the potentially relevant events to the outcomes of their university career. Longitudinal panel studies monitor the same generation of students over several years; consequently, these strategies are able to offer quite more accurate results because they reduce the risks related to the utilization of aggregate data. From a methodological point of view, we came to the creation of longitudinal multidimensional models of the students’ careers, aiming at identifying the “mechanisms” through which from an initial state t0, a subsequent state t1 is generated. In addition, we created two indexes related to the measurement of the distance in years and university credits to graduate according to the speed of achievement of credits maintained until that moment.