Gender Effect at the Beginning of Higher Education Career in STEM Studies

We explore if gender matter in the effect of the so-called “transfer shock” that in the literature is defined as a temporary decrease in academic performance by transfer students immediately following the transition to a new institution and the corresponding recovery prevalent for most students in succeeding semesters. Despite the fact that the gender issue is very relevant in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) higher education, no gender analysis has been conducted in this particular framework. Nonetheless, as Italy experiments relevant migration flows of students between Secondary Education (SE) graduation and Higher Education (HE), we study the effect of transfer shock in this specific point of the students’ career from a gender perspective. Our econometric strategy refers to multilevel modelling that allows to take into consideration not only individual characteristics (i.e. gender) but also that STEM students are clustered into university courses. Using micro-data provided by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), we find that students moving from the southern to northern regions of the country for their higher education suffer a transfer shock, and gender matter in this specific context. Referring to our main results, we stress the importance of multilevel modelling in this framework.