Designing a cohort study of freshmen as a resource for empowering university orientation and tutoring services.

The context of higher education is complex and articulated, and involves a multitude of different individualities and life paths. Each career is the result of an elaborate system of choices, different for each student and influenced by their personal, social, educational and life characteristics, needs and experiences. Being able to analyse such complexity would be an enrichment for any higher education institution. However, an analysis and reflection action of this magnitude, involving career paths, choices and responses of the institution, requires a systematic approach and multiple resources and competences. With respect to this, in this contribution, we report the experience of the University of Padua (Italy), an Athenaeum that welcomes thousands of new freshmen every year and had almost 66,000 enrolled students in a.y. 2021/22. It is a prestigious institution, which entered the top 20% of world universities in 2020 and is positively recognised for its level of internationalisation, the reputation of its graduates in the world of work and the quality of its teaching (ranking Agency QS). However, the large flow of students and processes makes it more complex to analyse career paths and to reflect on how the University's resources, particularly those dealing with guidance and tutoring, which are of interest to us, impact on the university experience. Starting from previous experience in the study of students’ careers and the analysis of the effect of tutoring actions, recently our research group, qualified in statistics and pedagogy, started, in coordination with the governance and university offices, to focus on a cohort study. The aim is to continuously and comprehensively monitor freshmen and their progress over time and thus make use of the multitude of information and data available. These data are composed of socio-economic characteristics of students (e.g. gender, age, citizenship, etc.), career information (grade point average, ECTS obtained, etc.) and data collected by questionnaire during enrolment (providing information on orientation received, choice process, etc.). The analysis of careers and available information is useful for the re-planning of pathway support activities, in particular orientation and tutoring. This contribution will specifically explore the potential of this analysis process and the results obtained, which can also be seen as good practices in other higher education contexts. The processing is currently being developed with reference to some personal and career data of the 2022 cohort of students. The results may be worthwhile for university, but also for Departments and Degree Courses, in order to have important evidence regarding the careers and experiences of enrolled students, and to better understand how to develop actions and resources to support their university pathway.