Modelling University Career Paths: A Competing-Risks Analysis of Dropout and Degree Completion at the University of Padova

This paper aims to identify some of the factors that determine university careers. Specifically, it refers to administrative data on students enrolled in first-cycle degree courses at the University of Padova, one of Italy’s largest public institutions, between the 2016–2017 and 2020–2021 academic years and considers the complexity of university careers, focusing not only on dropout but also on course changes and graduation. The availability of continuous-time data enables the application of cause-specific Cox proportional hazards models, allowing the estimation of the instantaneous risk of dropout and degree completion while accounting for competing risks. The models, estimated separately for the four fields of study identified at the University of Padova, show that some of the factors associated with the risk of dropping out and graduating act differently across fields of study. Particularly interesting are the results on degree programme changes, which are not important for preventing dropout (except for students enrolled in Humanities), but are associated with a lower hazard of graduation.