Abstract
The focus of this paper is on the relationships between social origin, participation in tertiary education (enrolment, drop-out, enrolment at second level and post-tertiary education) and occupational instability among university graduates in a recent period of university and labour market reforms (the differentiation of higher education due to the “Bologna process” and the flexibilization of employment contracts). In the first part of the paper we review these institutional reforms, discussing how they have changed the structure of opportunities and constraints for students and graduates. In the second part we analyse data from several cross-section waves of the Upper Secondary Graduates Survey and the University Graduates Survey which cover both pre- and post-reform cohorts. Results from logistic regression models show a slight decline in the association between parents’ education and enrolment in tertiary education, whereas there is a reduction and a new increase of inequality in drop-outs. We also find remarkable effects of parents’ education on enrolment in post-graduate courses, but smaller on the risks of having unstable jobs and both are mainly stable over time. Only a slight reduction of the role of social origin in university participation and in the transition to the labour market took place, but it seems not to be too closely connected to the specific reforms which occurred in the 1990s.
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Notes
This rule is still in place nowadays. Students who have successfully completed 5 years of upper secondary education—irrespective of the specific track (academic, technical, vocational)—is entitled to enrol in university without any form of restriction in the choice of type of university or field of study. However, some courses (mainly Medicine, Architecture, Psychology) have a numerus clausus in order to limit the number of students each year.
No formal institutional differentiation occurred among universities and private institutions remain few. At present all higher education institutions are still labelled as universities, even if notable differences exist in their size, structure and organization, quality of research and teaching.
This is usually due to two factors: the very small or medium size of Italian firms, oriented on hiring a lowly qualified labour force, and the backward public sector, with a prevalence of bureaucratic job positions (Reyneri 2006).
At the same time it should also be considered that the process of facilitation in the use of temporary employment began in the mid-1980s, a long time before the “legge Treu” (Gualmini 1998).
According to data by the Ministry of Education, University and Research in the academic year 2003/04 the quota of students who enrolled at university when they were 22 years old or over was around 22% (Own calculations on data presented on the website: www.statistica.miur.it; last access: 12 July 2010).
Cappellari and Lucifora (2009) use the same data source we employ in our analysis, but they only use the 1998 and 2001 cohorts of high school leavers to estimate the short-term causal effect of the reform. Instead we use a broader time span, covering two pre-reform and two post-reform cohorts of high school leavers in order to describe these phenomena over a longer period and to assess whether trends in social inequality are permanent or only transitional.
A considerable part of graduates—around 15% in our sample—is at the same time inactive in the labour market and involved in further education, so we can not observe their employment at labour market entry. Moreover the data available does not allow to investigate the relation between social origin and the long-term unstable job positions.
Results are available on request to the authors.
Students who enrolled at university the same year of their high school completion correspond to respectively 94% of the 1995 cohorts and 86% of the 1998, 2001 and 2004 cohorts.
This last assumption is quite usual (see for example Barbieri and Scherer 2009), but we tested it performing a sensitivity analysis. We tried to consider as unstable also traditional self-employed persons who are not satisfied about the stability of their job position. The conclusion of our analysis remains the same; we observed only a different distribution of cases among the categories of the dependent variable.
We consider “stage” as being unstable contracts because they have been often used as a form of flexibility by employers (and they are still used in this way in the Italian context, as the public debate about this topic shows). The general idea behind stage in Italy is that young people could gain skills offering their working time for free (or with a low payment), at the starting point of their career. There is no guarantee of a further transition into a stable job after the stage. In any case, we developed sensitivity analysis and our conclusion does not change from considering graduates attending a stage as inactive in the labour market.
For a description of the method used to calculate average partial effects see Bartus (2008).
See Online Appendix (simply called "Appendix" hereafter).
We suspect that the drop-out rate in the SGS surveys is slightly underestimated, because it is lower compared to other sources of data. It is possible that part of those who declare they are still enrolled are “not-active” students, who are formally enrolled but do not attend courses and do not progress in their educational career.
The rates presented here are very similar to those provided by Almalaurea on the actual transition rates between the first and the second cycle of study (Own calculations on data presented on the website: www.almalaurea.it; last access: 12 July 2010).
In the analysis on the UGS data the year of university graduation is reported on the x-axis.
Unfortunately, this operation introduces a sample selection bias, because it is likely that these students are on average more able and/or motivated than those who postpone their enrolment. We estimated additional models on all the students who enrolled in tertiary education within 3 years after graduation (controlling for year of enrolment) and trends of inequality over time are rather similar to those presented here.
The enrolment rate seems very high and we suspect that our data overestimates the overall amount of degree holders enrolled in post-tertiary education.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the participants at the Equalsoc Workshops and Meetings in Mannheim (April 2009), Tallinn (June 2009), Copenhagen (November 2009) and the ISA-Rc28 Spring Meeting in Beijing (14-16 May 2009) for useful comments on a previous version of this paper. We would also thank, in particular, Gabriele Ballarino, Carlo Barone, Giovanna Fullin, Michael Gebel, Walter Müller, Emilio Reyneri, Steffen Schindler, Domingo Scisci, Paolo Trivellato, Felix Weiss, the guest editors’ and an anonymous referee for their help and comments during the preparation of this paper. This research was funded by a grant to Moris Triventi from the University of Milano-Bicocca, co-financed by Regione Lombardia through the “FSE-Dote Ricercatori” programme (Project: 25-AR). Statements and opinions expressed in the article are those of the authors and cannot be attributed to the financing institutions.
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Argentin, G., Triventi, M. Social inequality in higher education and labour market in a period of institutional reforms: Italy, 1992–2007. High Educ 61, 309–323 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-010-9379-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-010-9379-6