Post-diploma choices of students in Southern Italy

An important choice in personal experience, for those attending the last year of high school, is undoubtedly the one that concerns the decision whether to undertake university studies or enter the working world. The present paper is aimed at evaluating the choice and the propensity of students, attending the last year of high school, towards university enrolment; therefore, we want to study the tendency that they have expressed, through the completion of a questionnaire, to continue their studies or to enter in the working context; in this way we obtained a comprehensive view of the progress of an important social weight phenomenon. An ``ad hoc" survey, realized on a sample of students in Messina, a town in the Southern Italy, has allowed the collection of statistical information on a total of 837 units. In our analysis we performed comparisons between students, based on appropriate grouping variables, within two strata (those who intend to continue their studies and who intend to enter immediately in the employment context). From a methodological point of view, we used the NPC test based on permutation solution. It was chosen for its several optimal properties, that make it very flexible and widely applicable in several fields; in particular, it allows stratified analyses and represents an effective solution for problems concerning the testing of multidimensional hypotheses, that are difficult to face in a parametric context.