Abstract
Using data from the five waves of the Italian Longitudinal Household Survey, this paper examines the dynamics of Italian higher education in the twentieth century. The main goals are to study changes in participation in higher education (enrolment, transition, and graduation rates), in performance (drop out and delayed graduation rates, average delay duration), and how these have changed in different social classes. The main results are as follows. Enrolment growth has not been followed by a proportional increase in graduation rates. The drop out rate, the number of delayed graduations and the average delay duration were already high before the 1969 reform, and subsequently increased over time. Delayed graduations increased among students from both upper-middle and lower-middle classes, whereas the drop out rate rose only among the latter, and stayed steady for the former. As a whole, absolute inequalities persisted over time, with any slight reduction that took place resulting from declining performance of the upper classes, and not from an improvement of the lower classes.
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Notes
We examine the main trends beginning in the academic year 1943–1944 and ending in 1995–1996, i.e. when respondents born in 1970 should in principle have completed their university studies, allowing for a three year delay in graduating in the case of 4-year programmes, and a two year delay in graduating in the case of 5-year programmes.
From a telephone survey conducted at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Schizzerotto and Denti 2005), the main reasons given by students for dropping out were, in order: work commitments (40.6%), mistaken choice (29.2%), family and personal reasons (17.0%), negative opinion of university studies (13.2%).
The term effectiveness applied to university denotes here not so much the ability to translate a degree into satisfactory employment, nor the ability to answer the needs of the job market, but rather the capacity for correct internal functioning and its associated indicators, independently of the financial resources deployed (efficiency).
The introduction of university diplomas in 1990 did not materially alter this situation. In the first place, university diplomas were devised as an alternative, rather than complementary, path to a university education; what is more, they have been offered only in certain fields (medical, economic, engineering and scientific), and their reputation has been damaged by their not counting as valid qualifications for public competitive exams.
More detailed information on the sample design is available in Bernardi and Pisati (2002).
The distribution of the “actual duration/prescribed duration” ratio was very skewed, with a long tail on the right. Transformation to a log-natural scale changes this distribution to one very similar to a Gaussian curve. We can thus use a linear regression model to predict the values of the transformed index.
In an exploratory phase of the analysis we applied the lowess smoothing method, which showed the trends under scrutiny to be non linear; this means that simple linear regression models cannot adequately approximate these relationships. Although lowess smoothing provides a good representation of the data, it does not produce a regression function that can be easily represented by a mathematical equation. In order to overcome this limit we have applied fractional polynomials.
Table A1 in the Appendix shows a summary of the powers of Xs of the best-fitting fractional polynomials. Detailed estimation results can be requested from the authors at m.triventi@campus.unimib.it.
In particular, the international comparability of the results for Italian university participation during the last century is subject to certain limitations. The greatest obstacle is the different duration of the degree courses. Italy for a long time continued to have a single study cycle lasting four or five years, while other countries instead adopted a system made up of two cycles (with the first generally lasting three years, and the second 2 years). This difference was eliminated by the reform of 1999 which introduced three-year and specialist degrees in Italy.
The ILFI data reveal that among the cohort of subjects born in the period 1966–1983, the average proportion of students who enrolled late in university, that is to say at more than 19 years of age, was about 35% (Trivellato and Triventi 2007).
It must be noted that what we are looking at are absolute differences, computed on the population as a whole. This focuses attention on the final result of the combined effects of a “social closure” and the mechanisms influencing overall rates of student participation, rather than on the intensity of the selection processes themselves (Pisati 2002). The latter can be investigated by looking at the relative inequalities, for example through the approach of academic transitions and the use of binomial logistical regression models (Mare 1980, 1981). For Italy, see the results presented in Pisati (2002).
The overall result is in agreement with the findings of Checchi et al. (2007), who showed that even among the youngest cohorts there continue to be inequalities in the likelihood of dropping out of university between the children of university-educated parents and those of lower-educated parents.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Maurizio Pisati and Antonio Schizzerotto for their useful comments and suggestions. A previous version of this paper was presented at the ISA-RC28 Meeting in Montreal, 14–17 August 2007; we would like to thank the people who made useful comments at the conference, in particular Kevin Leicht, Hans Schadee and Gabriele Ballarino. The research has been co-funded by the University of Milano-Bicocca and by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, contract n° 2004149592.
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Triventi, M., Trivellato, P. Participation, performance and inequality in Italian higher education in the 20th century. High Educ 57, 681–702 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-008-9170-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-008-9170-0