Intergenerational Mobility and Schooling Decisions in Germany and Italy: The Impact of Secondary School Tracks
By Daniele Checchi, Luca Flabbi. Social Science Research Network, 2007
161 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Intergenerational mobility in income and education is affected by the influence of parents on children's school choices. Our focus is on the role played by different school systems in reducing or magnifying the impact of parents on children's school choices and therefore on intergenerational mobility in general. We compare two apparently similar educational systems, Italy and Germany, to see how the common feature of separate tracks at Secondary School level may produce different impacts on children choices. Using data from a cross-country survey (PISA 2003), we study the impact of parental education on track choice, showing that the greater flexibility of the Italian system (where parents are free to choose the type of track) translates into greater dependence from parental background. These effects are reinforced when moving to post-secondary education, where the aspiration to go to college is affected not only by the school type but also (in the case of Italy only) by parental education. We then move to country-specific data sets (ISTAT 2001 for Italy and GSOEP 2001 and 2002 for Germany) to study the impact of family background on post-secondary school choices: we find this impact is greatly reduced when we control for secondary school tracks. Overall, we estimate large asymmetries by gender, with women's behavior more independent from family backgrounds than men's behavior.
Subfields: Demography, Education, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64b1678b7a146976529ca17e5ca00c463f8be852
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Citations in the corpus
- Welfare Regimes and Education Regimes: Equality of Opportunity and Expenditure in the EU (and US) (2013, background): “Each of the school tracks is associated with different outcomes: nearly nine out of ten licei graduates progress to university compared with fewer than one in five graduates of istituti di formazione professionale (Checchi and Flabbi, 2007).”