Lauree, competizione di mercato e riproduzione sociale. Caratteristiche, percorsi ed esiti occupazionali dei neolaureati italiani in un contesto in rapido mutamento

In recent years, two main reforms have occurred in Italy, changing the general context where youth transition processes take place. First of all, there has been a deep labour market deregulation. This has increased the amount of unstable job positions, especially among cohorts looking for their first job after 1997. Secondly, but no less importantly, there has been an increase in the enrolment rate to tertiary education and the Bologna process introduced relevant innovation to the Italian University system. The graduate population is then, not only an increasing part of the overall youth population of the country, but also the subgroup which has been doubly affected by the reforms. For this reason, I decided to investigate this subgroup of young people more deeply, analysing how the transition from university to work has changed over time. I used the last five waves of the ISTAT Survey on the transition to work of University graduates (1995 to 2007) and an AlmaLaurea database to investigate the graduates labour market condition five years after the degree. I use mainly multinomial logistic regression models and I adopted the marginal effects approach to compare models over time and between groups. I also used propensity score matching. I observed that there has been a de-standardization process: the typical “from university to work” description is no longer a good representation of the concrete processes taking place after the graduation. In fact there has been an increase in participation in the labour market before graduation (anticipation in the transition process) and to post-tertiary enrolment (delay). Moreover, there has been in recent years an increase in the unstable job position of graduates three years after graduation. This de-standardization process does not imply individualization: social origins and gender continue to shape the graduates transition into labour market. It seems that two main pathways are emerging: the first, more frequent for children coming from higher social origins, is based on fast transition through University with a high performance that leads to post-tertiary enrolment; the second, more frequent among lower origins students is, instead a mix of work and study during university which leads more frequently to a stable occupation after the degree, but paying the price of higher over-education. This suggests that, in a context of expansion of higher education, the returns to it could differ among social classes.