Educational Expansion and Inequality: School in Italy in the Second Part of the 20th Century

This chapter reviews the Italian case in order to shed light on the relations between expanding participation in education and educational inequality, on the one hand, and returns to education, on the other. Theoretically, the chapter relies on the OED triangle, the standard framework by which stratification research addresses issues of equality/inequality of opportunities, and it refers to the debate counterposing modernization theory and reproduction theory. Empirically, the chapter uses a new data set deriving from the harmonization of a number of high-quality surveys, thus giving to the analyses higher statistical power and better reliability, particularly concerning trends over time. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part briefly reviews the main theoretical arguments provided by stratification research concerning the relations between education and socioeconomic inequality and their trends over time. The second part looks at the Italian case, placing the expansion of education in the historical context of postwar Italy. The third part presents an empirical analysis of class inequality in school achievement, of returns to schooling and, finally, of the direct effect of social origins over and above education.