A new look at schooling inequalities in Italy and their trends over time

Abstract

This article examines whether the influence of family background on educational attainment has changed in Italy in the course of the 20th century. For several European countries, recent studies have come to question the widely agreed thesis of persistent schooling inequalities. This work discusses extensively factors that may produce variations of class differentials in academic achievement and in participation rates in the Italian case. The empirical analyses are based on a new dataset and on new modelling techniques that ensure high statistical power to detect trends over time. Yet, the substantive conclusions point to a prevailing stability of class differentials, with a limited equalisation restricted to the agricultural classes in the oldest cohorts.