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This meta-analysis examines the effects of sorting secondary students into different tracks ("between-school" tracking) or classrooms ("within-school" tracking) on the efficiency and inequality levels of an educational system. Efficiency is related to the overall learning achievement of students, whereas inequality can refer to "inequality of achievement" (i.e., the dispersion of outcomes) or "inequality of opportunity" (i.e., the strength of the influence of family background on student achievement). The selected publications are 53 analyses performed in the period from 2000 to 2021, yielding 213 estimates on efficiency and 230 estimates on inequality. The results show that the mean effect size (Hedge's G) of tracking on efficiency is not statistically significant (G = -0.063), whereas it is significantly positive (G = 0.117) on inequality. We further set out to explain variation in effect sizes by (a) policy characteristics, (b) the operationalization of main variables, (c) the research design, (d) the set of control variables included in the statistical analyses, and (e) the quality of the study, year of publication, and publication status (peer reviewed or not peer reviewed).

Teachers' evaluations of students do not consider only academic competence, but are imbued with social considerations related to individual teacher and student characteristics, their interactions, and the surrounding context. The aim of this paper is understanding the extent to which teachers grade girls more generously than boys, and which characteristics of teachers and classrooms are likely to reduce this gender grading gap. We use Italian data from INVALSI-SNV, providing information on 10th-grade students linked with their teachers. The analysis relies on grade equation models in multilevel regression analysis, with students as first level, teachers/classrooms as second level, and schools as third level. Results show that, when comparing students who have identical subject-specific competence, teachers are more likely to give higher grades to girls. Furthermore, they demonstrate for the first time that this grading premium favouring girls is systemic, as teacher and classroom characteristics play a negligible role in reducing it.

In this work, we investigate whether grants improve the academic outcomes of students from socio-economically disadvantaged families and thereby reduce inequalities of educational opportunities. We focus on Italy, which is characterized by high dropout rates, prolonged duration of higher education studies and considerable social inequalities in educational outcomes. To estimate the effect of grants, we follow a counterfactual approach, relying on a reweighting matching procedure. First, we apply coarsened exact matching to identify the region of common support. Second, we weight the observation using the entropy balancing method. We use a nationally representative survey, which collects data on students who graduated from upper secondary school in 2004 and 2007. We find that grants reduce dropout and increase timely graduation, with larger effects among males and students in Central-Southern Italy, who are more at risk of withdrawal from university.

The article examines the mid-term occupational outcomes of two cohorts of PhDs graduated in 2004 and 2008 in Italy. This comparison allows the authors to explore changing PhD's occupational prospects after recent academic reforms (e.g. cuts to public funding, introduction of fixed-term positions for assistant professors) and the economic crisis. Population data from the 'Istat Survey on the Occupational Outcomes of PhD graduates' is used to analyse PhD's employability, international mobility, type of contract and occupation 5 years after obtaining a doctoral degree. Empirical results show that academic reforms and the economic crisis coincided with decreasing employment in academia and increasing chances of having a fixed-term contract, being employed abroad and working in research-related occupations outside academia. Moreover, PhD graduates from hard disciplines, such as engineering, are generally better off compared to PhD graduates in soft fields, such as sociology. Finally, the results suggest that the academic reforms reduced the chances to work in academia more in soft rather than in hard academic disciplines.

Graduate and doctoral schools around the world struggle to shorten the long time to degree and to prevent high dropout rates. While most of previous research studied individual determinants of PhD completion, we analyze the impact of two structural reforms of the doctoral program on thesis completion at a selective European graduate school. Exploiting a unique PhD dataset covering 30 entry cohorts, we identify reform effects on PhD outcomes using an interrupted time-series regression design. We find that the first reform improved timely completion rates by between 10 and 15 percentage points (according to the specific outcome), whereas the second reform increased completion rates by between 9 and 20 percentage points. Additionally, each reform reduced dropout rates by 7 percentage points. The results are robust to various sensitivity checks. At the end, we discuss lessons learned for those in charge of graduate schools and/or PhD programs.

The educational system is a crucial arena for the integration of the children of immigrants. We study the consequences of the presence of students with a migration background on various student outcomes, overall and distinguishing among natives, second- and first-generation children. We focus on Italy, a country that experienced a rapid increase in the presence of children of immigrants in school. First, we analyze not only students' competencies but also their well-being and social integration. Second, we investigate the joint effects of two dimensions of migrants' presence in the classroom: immigrant proportion and ethnolinguistic diversity. Third, we develop a design to make exposure to a level of immigrant proportion and ethnolinguistic diversity conditionally random. We use data collected by the National Institute for the Evaluation of the Italian School System on the entire population of students enrolled in the fifth grade in 2014–15. Our findings suggest that the immigrant proportion and ethno-linguistic diversity in the classroom have limited detrimental effects; their minor effects are widely independent of each other and approximately linear. The impact is tiny and appears to be concentrated exclusively on first-generation students. Implications for theoretical debate and educational policies are discussed in relation to the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this country-comparative study, we ask to what extent differentiation in secondary education accounts for the association between social origins and social destinations in adult age. We go beyond the widely applied formal definitions of educational tracking and particularly pay attention to country-specific approaches to educational differentiation. Our main expectation is that once we factor in these particularities, the degree to which educational differentiation accounts for social reproduction is quite similar across countries. Our analyses are based on national individual-level life-course data from six European countries that span from secondary education to occupational maturity. Our findings show that educational differentiation mediates the association between social origins and social destinations to a substantial degree in all countries. However, we still find some differences between countries in the extent to which educational differentiation accounts for social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of formal childcare under the age of three in tackling the early social inequality in children's cognitive and socio-emotional competencies in Germany, by drawing on the new-born sample of the National Educational Panel Study. To this end, we study first whether the access to formal early childhood education and care (ECEC) differs by parents' socio-economic status (SES), by means of logistic regressions. Second, we analyse the main effect of attending ECEC institutions. Third, we ask whether the effect of attending ECEC on children's competencies differs by SES. We perform OLS regression with inverse probability weighting to address confounding bias possibly arising from selection into care arrangements. Moreover, we developed a counterfactual analysis to compare the observed SES gradient in children's competencies with two alternative extreme scenarios, one characterized by the absence of ECEC, and the other by universalistic access to ECEC. Our findings show that ECEC attendance is socially stratified and suggest an equalizing impact of ECEC institutions. We conclude that ECEC can play a compensatory function on social stratification, by making the expansion of formal early childcare expenditures a fruitful investment for more equal opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Citizenship Income (Reddito di Cittadinanza, RdC) consists of the provision of a monetary subsidy to supplement the income of poor families, conditional on adherence to paths of social and work inclusion. The aim of this article is to present one of the first impact evaluations of the RdC on the employment outcomes of beneficiaries in the Sardinia Region who were in a state of unemployment at the time they began to receive the benefit, between April 2019 and June 2021. The empirical analysis is based on two large databases taken from administrative sources, provided by the Labor and Training Information System. Their integration makes it possible to reconstruct the socio-personal characteristics and the working careers of both the recipients of the RdC and non-beneficiaries who have had at least one contact with the Employment Centers (CPI). The analytical strategy is based on the innovative combination of statistical matching techniques (entropy balancing), binomial logistic regression, survival analysis, and meta-analysis techniques. The results indicate that, overall, having received the RdC reduced the subsequent employment chances almost negligibly for those who were unemployed when they began to receive the economic benefit. However, the heterogeneity analysis suggests that perceiving the RdC contributed to decreasing employment chances for those categories that were in a position of traditional weakness in relation to the labor market in Sardinia and more generally in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this article is to explore similarities and differences in the institutional features of private and state universities in the Italian higher education system and to assess whether graduating from a private university conveys advantages in the labour market. In the first part we use administrative data to describe the main institutional features of the two types of university, looking at organisational aspects, enrolments and graduates, financial resources, tuition fees, and teachers' characteristics. In the second part we develop a theoretical framework looking at sociological and economic theories of education and labour market, from which we derive some hypotheses on the expected results. In the last part, we apply a propensity score matching analysis on data from the Italian University Graduates Survey conducted in 2007 by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, which provides information on more than 40,000 graduates who obtained their degree in 2004. The main results indicate that graduates from private universities are younger, have a higher socio-economic background and a slightly better previous school career than those from state universities. Contrary to a widespread belief, once accounted for self-selection into the type of university using a wide range of variables, graduating from a private university has neither a significant nor a substantial effect on employment probability, hourly wage and occupational level three years after graduation.

The focus of this paper is on the relationships between social origin, participation in tertiary education (enrolment, drop-out, enrolment at second level and post-tertiary education) and occupational instability among university graduates in a recent period of university and labour market reforms (the differentiation of higher education due to the "Bologna process" and the flexibilization of employment contracts). In the first part of the paper we review these institutional reforms, discussing how they have changed the structure of opportunities and constraints for students and graduates. In the second part we analyse data from several cross-section waves of the Upper Secondary Graduates Survey and the University Graduates Survey which cover both pre- and post-reform cohorts. Results from logistic regression models show a slight decline in the association between parents' education and enrolment in tertiary education, whereas there is a reduction and a new increase of inequality in drop-outs. We also find remarkable effects of parents' education on enrolment in post-graduate courses, but smaller on the risks of having unstable jobs and both are mainly stable over time. Only a slight reduction of the role of social origin in university participation and in the transition to the labour market took place, but it seems not to be too closely connected to the specific reforms which occurred in the 1990s.

Using data from the five waves of the "Italian Longitudinal Household Survey," this paper examines the dynamics of Italian higher education in the twentieth century. The main goals are to study changes in participation in higher education (enrolment, transition, and graduation rates), in performance (drop out and delayed graduation rates, average delay duration), and how these have changed in different social classes. The main results are as follows. Enrolment growth has not been followed by a proportional increase in graduation rates. The drop out rate, the number of delayed graduations and the average delay duration were already high before the 1969 reform, and subsequently increased over time. Delayed graduations increased among students from both upper-middle and lower-middle classes, whereas the drop out rate rose only among the latter, and stayed steady for the former. As a whole, absolute inequalities persisted over time, with any slight reduction that took place resulting from declining performance of the upper classes, and not from an improvement of the lower classes.