High school choice: How do parents make their choice?

Location, well-qualified teachers, leaving score and academic performance are the main factors associated with parents' high school choices. This paper aims to provide students and their parents with a helpful tool for synthesizing these elements. By focusing on a small Italian town, we analyze Eduscopio and ScuolainChiaro's data concerning high schools' characteristics and students' performances, and apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in order to derive the ranking of high schools taking into account three criteria: the students' performance at school, their academic performance and the school's characteristics (such as the number of students per class and per teacher). The results from the AHP procedure using only school performances and characteristics highlight that the classic lyceum has the best performance and the scientific lyceums rank second, albeit rather close to the other lyceums. Entering the academic performance factor into the model changes the ranking of preferences in favor of the scientific lyceum, whose value is slightly higher than the classic one, and decreases the values of the other lyceums and technical high schools. This is due to the excellent academic performance of those who leave scientific schools, mostly in terms of credits at the end of the first year and average exam scores.