Should I stay or should I go? Dropping out from university: an empirical analysis of students' performances

By using a sample of 56,807 first-year students from a large Italian university based in the South of Italy, from academic year 2002-2003 to academic year 2010-2011, this paper examines the determinants of university dropout between the first and the second year. The main goal is to contribute to the existent literature on students’ withdrawing focusing on individuals’ basic demographics, educational background and pre-enrollment characteristics and households’ financial conditions. The empirical evidence shows that students’ prior educational background and performances play an important role on the decision to drop out. Estimates are robust to different structures of the error terms.