Inter-regional migration flows from the South to the Centre-North have been endemic in Italy since a long time. Unlike the past, new migrants show a high incidence of qualified workers with secondary or tertiary education; moreover, Southerners have started to migrate also during their studies, typically to enrol in a Centre-Northern university. Student mobility reflects territorial disparities between the North and the South of Italy in terms of economic opportunities and labour market conditions: empirical evidence shows that students migrating for study purposes are unlikely to go back to the South after they graduate. Furthermore, it is observed that migrants often constitute a positively selected group in terms of both skills and motivation. In this context, a substantial proportion of the Southern, most qualified human capital gets drained by destination regions. We evaluate the propensity to move among “high-quality” students, i.e. those with the best performances at school by making use of individual-level information from the Istat database on graduates’ transition 2011. Our empirical analysis is developed using multilevel modelling to account for clustering of students by region of school attendance, and simultaneous equations modelling to take into account the endogeneity bias in grading caused by the family background.