The role of contextual factors: institutional changes in the university system and in the labor market

The research we present extends our previous work on the individual determinants of student academic careers, by focusing on the role of institutional changes and labour market factors. In the following study, (1) we aim at reconstructing norms, regulations and actions introduced at the university level and at the level of departments and degree courses that could have had an impact on student academic careers; (2) we analyse the role of institutional factors by “translating” the results of (1) into diachronic indicators of the changes intervened in the past years, and incorporate these indicators as time-varying explanatory variables in the
quantitative analyses of student academic careers; (3) we also investigate a topic that we had not included in the original proposal, i.e. the effect of family economic conditions on the university dropout probability.