Social stratification, secondary school tracking and university enrolment in Italy

This paper looks at class inequality in the probability of enrolling in university in Italy from a long-term perspective. Given that Italian higher secondary education is tracked, it studies how tracking interacts over time with class origin in the production of inequality of educational opportunities, thus contributing to the growing literature on the inequality effects of the qualitative, or horizontal, stratification of educational systems. The paper has thus two research questions. First, it asks whether class inequality in participation in higher education has changed over time; second, whether and how this change was influenced by the tracked structure of upper secondary school. Empirical analyses are based on data from the Italian Longitudinal Household Survey, a retrospective panel survey including detailed life-course information about a representative sample of the Italian population. In an educational transition framework, we analyse the association between social class, tracking and university enrolment, applying the Karlson/Holm/Breen decomposition method for logistic regression coefficients. We find increasing inequality in accessing university, and a change in the role of upper secondary track, whose mediating role between family background and university choice appears to have weakened over time.