Informal recruitment channels, family background and university enrolments in Italy
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Informal recruitment channels, family background and university enrolments in Italy Emanuela Ghignoni 1
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
This paper analyses the impact of informal recruitment channels on university enrolment decisions. A widespread diffusion of personal connections as an entry channel to the labour market may signal that social ties to well-off people are necessary to get a good job, thereby convincing students from poorly connected families that getting a tertiary education degree does not enhance their future socio-economic opportunities. By applying estimation techniques with instrumental variables to Italian microdata, I found that upper-secondary students coming from lower social classes are less likely to participate in tertiary education when they live in provinces where the percentage of newly tertiary graduates who found a job through informal channels is higher. My results are consistent with the hypothesis that the wide diffusion of ‘favouritism’ in local labour markets engenders a sense of ‘economic despair’ among poorly connected students, thereby worsening inequality of access to education and local socio-economic development.literature and the hypothesis Keywords Informal channels . Social class . Favouritism . University enrolments . Local labour markets
Introduction Italy is characterised by the lowest percentage of tertiary graduates in the 25–34 age group among OECD countries (OECD 2015) and by deep and increasing inequalities of access to university education by social origin (Triventi and Trivellato 2009).1 Even though the temporary growth of enrolments driven by the 2001 University Reform tended to slightly reduce inequality of educational opportunities among people from different social backgrounds (Di 1
See this article for a brief history of the Italian university system. For its more recent evolution, see Cattaneo et al. 2017.
* Emanuela Ghignoni [email protected]
1
Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Castro Laurenziano, 9, 00161 Rome, Italy
Higher Education
Pietro and Cutillo 2008), the subsequent ‘great escape’ from Italian universities has been especially driven by a leak of low socio-economic status students (Ghignoni 2016). At the same time, ‘family and friends’ is, by far, the main entry channel in Italian labour markets for the whole workforce, and the second entry channel for new entrants with a tertiary education degree (Fig. 1). As a matter of fact, in Mediterranean countries, family ties are rather strong, and the implications for the economy and labour markets’ institutions (Alesina et al. 2015) are expected to be pervasive. Nevertheless, the percentage of Italian tertiary graduates who found their job through ‘family and friends’ is quite high when compared with international researches, generally indicating that this method is mostly employed by less educated individuals. In particular, Pellizzari (2010) shows that informal job search methods in Europe are widely used by people with primary education. B
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