• School Career in the Pisa Province
• Nonlinear Least Squares
• Logistic Model
• Generalized Linear Model
• Bootstrap

Nowadays education is a global value and a particular challenge for all countries.
The European Parliament during the Lisbon European Council (2010) stated that: “The rapid and accelerating pace of change means it is urgent for the Union to act now to harness the full benefits of the opportunities presented. Hence the need for the Union to set a clear strategic goal and agree a challenging programme for building knowledge infrastructures, enhancing innovation and economic reform, and modernising social welfare and education systems.”
All countries need to be aware of the problems and difficulties that education has especially the ones related to school career outcome in terms of performances, delays and school leaving phenomena that is a touching point for the European Union in the educational field.
The European Union defines school-leavers those people aged 18 to 24 who have an educational degree that includes pre-primary, primary, secondary school or higher education, not greater than two years.
In Italy school-leavers are students who leave school before the age of sixteen, which marks the end of the compulsory education period.
The European Union explains that school-leavers are easily exposed to unemployment, they often need social subsidies for a longer period compared to better educated unemployed subjects and they have a higher risk of social exclusion. This leads to negative consequences both in countries’ welfare and health systems. Finally, they are less involved in the “democratic process”.
The aim of European Parliament is a 10% reduction of the school-leaving rate before 2020 for people aged between 18 and 24.
As it emerges from a MIUR statistic, the Italian condition is alarming. Italy is second in the OECD school-leaving rate ranking, with 17.75% of students under 25 failing to complete their higher education career.
In my thesis I can’t actually study the school-leaving issue as a whole because I don’t dispose of sufficient information to follow all the students until the end of their school careers. This is the reason why I have decided to focus on a different aspect: the success or failure of school career meaning the achievement of the high school diploma in time, in case of success, or with a delay in case of failure.
My work introduces a statistical study of the school career outcome in secondary and higher education concerning the scholastic population of Pisa Province with the aim of identifying which educational/social/economical variables are the keys to explain the success or failure outcome in the students careers.
The statistical study was directed by Pisa Province OSP following the scholastic careers of a cohort of 3185 students who attended secondary and high schools in Pisa Province.
The longitudinal data for the students of the cohort were collected over 8 years, since sy 2005/2006, first year of secondary school, until sy 2012/2013, the last year of high school, i.e. the completion of the legal duration of secondary education in Italy.