Espansione dell’istruzione e disuguaglianza delle opportunità educative nell’Italia contemporanea

The paper analyses the relation between class of origin and educational attainment over time in Italy. The key question is whether the overall educational expansion that has occurred in the country has also brought about a lessening in the inequality of educational opportunities (IEO) by social class of origin. The main conclusion of the first comparative study on IEO suggested persisting class inequalities in education in almost all the 13 countries analysed, including Italy. In recent years, however, this conclusion has been questioned for an increasing number of countries and, lastly, by the first results of new comparative studies. The paper treats educational titles as ordered categories and models educational attainment by class of origins and cohort using cumulative logits (ordinal regression). Differences in educational attainment depend on the parameters locating the cumulative logistic distribution of educational titles for a class and a cohort, and on the location of the “separators” between educational levels. This type of statistical model explicitly allows to investigate how differences among countries in the structure of the educational system and in the educational expansion affect IEO. We consider cohorts born between 1920 and 1969, four educational titles and six social classes (coded according to a reduced version of the EGP scheme). Our results show a decrease of IEO across cohorts: this is true not only for the agricultural classes (as previous literature already noted) but also for the urban classes. This result is robust to different specifications of the cumulative logistic model.