Carmen Aina

Time to degree: students' abilities, university characteristics or something else? Evidence from Italy

We use a representative sample of Italian graduates drawn from the Consorzio AlmaLaurea to assess the impact of individual and family characteristics, university inputs and the labour market on the time taken to attain a degree. Our estimates highlight that all these dimensions drive the outcome analysed. Weak labour market prospects contribute particularly to length time to degree. Our results suggest that a comprehensive policy intervention is needed to increase the number of students graduating within the minimum period.

Il fuoricorsismo tra falsi miti e realtà

The Italian university system has alwayssuffered from a high percentage of students whofail to complete their studies or find themselvesseriously lagging behind, the latter case beingthe focus of this article. It is a phenomenon thatinvolves a considerable waste of resources andskills. Reorganised and reworked here are a seriesof articles and commentaries published in blogsand online journals by the authors over the lastyear, also drawing upon the resulting extensiveexchanges with the readers. This has stimulatedfurther thinking, the fruit of which is this text.

Family Origin and Early School Leaving in Italy: The Long-Term Effects of Internal Migration

The proportion of early school leavers in Italy is high by European Union standards. However, it is not uniformly distributed across the country: in Southern regions, it is almost double than in Centre-Northern area. This chapter goes beyond descriptive evidence and examines the conditional probability of leaving school with (at most) the compulsory schooling certificate in Italy using seven waves of Bank of Italy’s SHIW data, covering individuals born in the period from 1979 to 1995. Among various determinants, we focus on the role played by family origin. Our results show that youths born in the Centre-North with both parents from Southern Italy (second generation internal migrants) behave similarly to youths born and living in the South, so that they are more likely to drop out school earlier than comparable individuals born in the Centre-North with parents from the same area (natives). When only the household head is from the South, second generation migrants are similar to natives and the assimilation with native born in terms of schooling choices at the age of 14 is complete. Differences in family characteristics (education, financial conditions) are able to account for a large share of raw differences in education decisions between individuals born in Centre-North vs. South, as well as between natives and second generation migrants born in the Centre-North of Italy. The analysis of these dynamics over time shows that differences across groups of youths defined by their origin narrow since the mid- 2000.