STUDENTS’ MOBILITY IN THE COVID-19 ERA: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN ITALY

It is undoubted that the Covid-19 pandemics had a significant impact on various facets of education at any level, and universities are not an exception. In 2020, universities were immediately forced to adopt alternative approaches to continue the students’ academic year, in line with the countermeasures taken by governments against the pandemics; in many countries, this basically meant shifting abruptly from physical (face-to-face) learning to remote learning (e-learning). Although in the subsequent years the academic activities were gradually restored, students’ mobility was seriously penalized by the pandemics. Indeed, as any type of natural disasters and public health crises, the Covid‐19 pandemics has significantly constrained human (and student’s) mobility, besides affecting, more in general, the way people work, socialise or travel. International student mobility, therefore, suffered from transformed teaching modes (so as to avoid/reduce personal mobility) and overall, the initial (pre-Covid) conditions do not seem to have been fully reset yet. With the aim to investigate these aspects in the Italian context, this paper provides the results of an empirical analysis carried out among students of the Department of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Parma. The sample includes bachelor and master’s degree students who graduated in 2022, and Ph.D. students who defended their thesis in the same year, resulting in nearly 700 students. These students were enrolled at University under various programs, but all felt into the Covid-19 period. A questionnaire was designed and submitted to this sample to capture the trends in students’ mobility. Results indicate that approximately 10% (only) of the students was able to undertake a mobility experience; these students belong to different degree programs as well as to Ph.D programs. At the same time, students who did not undertake a mobility program are somehow willing to postpone that experience in the future; Covid-19 is for sure among the main motivations for not undertaking the mobility program, but other relevant aspects emerge. Outcomes are expected to fuel the debate about the general theme of student’s mobility, as well as to provide a starting point for delineating new mobility programs in the future.