Research on Students’ Performance in Higher Education through Sequence Analysis

This paper aims to prove how adequate the Sequence Analysis’ tools are in the study of the complexity of the Italian higher education system. Indeed, this system has been strongly challenged by dispersion in its main aspects: (1) low number of graduates; (2) excessively long university careers; (3) very high number of drop outs. Through longitudinal administrative data of a cohort of students enrolled at Sapienza University of Rome, the Sequence Analysis allows: (1) to describe the phenomena of late graduation and delayed performance; (2) to identify different types of students dropping out; (3) evaluation of other particular phenomena that can delay the students’ career. Through this analysis, we will focus our attention on individual as well as on contextual factors because we assume that: «It is one thing to understand why students leave; it is another to know what institutions can do to help students stay and succeed»