How many students study far from home
More than half of university students in Italy study in a different province from the one where they finished school. In Bologna, almost eight in ten. The Ministry’s numbers, year by year.
Every September the same thing happens across half of Italy: a suitcase, a train, a new city. How many students actually leave home to study? The Ministry of University publishes a figure that gets close to the answer: for every enrolled student, the province of the secondary school where they got their diploma and the province where they attend their course.
More than one student in two
In the 2024/25 academic year, the students counted in this dataset number 1,704,411. Of these, 901,129 study in a different province from the one where they got their diploma: 52.9%. Another 93,954 got their diploma abroad.
Not all of them live away from home in the sense we mean. Someone who finished school in Monza and studies in Milan, for example, can go home every evening. But the order of magnitude is clear: studying far from where you grew up isn’t the exception, it’s normal.
Fifteen years of numbers
In 2010/11 the share was 50.3%. It rose every year up to 54.2% in 2021/22, then dipped slightly, staying above 52%. Over the same period, students with a foreign diploma almost doubled, from 49,057 to 93,954.
One detail matters: between 2010/11 and 2016/17 total enrolment fell from over 1.85 million to about 1.6 million, and yet the share of students studying away from home grew every year. Even as there were fewer students, those who moved became a bigger slice.
Milan, Bologna, Rome
The three cities where Uniflat opens first tell three different stories.
- Bologna: in 2024/25, courses based in the province have 65,386 students, and 51,151 come from another province or from abroad. That’s 78%. In 2010/11 it was 75%
- Milan: 191,656 students, of whom 137,074 come from outside the province or from abroad. 72%, up from 66% in 2010/11
- Rome: 209,402 students, 101,840 from outside. 49%. Rome is the only one of the three where the share fell compared with 2010/11 (55%), although it has been rising again since 2020/21
In other words: in Bologna, a student you meet in the street almost certainly comes from another city. In Milan, nearly three in four. And every one of them, at some point, had to find a home and people to share it with.
What about beds?
Through the PNRR, the Ministry set a target of 60,000 new beds for students living away from home by 30 June 2026. It’s an important number. Set next to the nine hundred thousand who study outside their province, though, it also says something else: the vast majority of these students will keep living in shared flats, with flatmates they often didn’t choose.
How to read these numbers
Three caveats, to be honest. The Ministry’s figure excludes online universities and combinations with fewer than five students. The province is where the course is based, not the town. And «a different province from the diploma» isn’t exactly «lives away from home»: it’s the closest official measure there is.
The point stands: in Italy about nine hundred thousand students go through university far from the province where they grew up, often in a city where at first they hardly know anyone. That’s who Uniflat is for.
Sources
- Students enrolled «In Sede/Fuori Sede», 2010/11 to 2024/25 (file 14c)Italian Ministry of University and Research, Statistics Office, accessed on 29 September 2026
- Housing universitarioItalian Ministry of University and Research, accessed on 29 September 2026
