Allocation and distribution. A discussion of the educational transition model, with reference to the Italian case

The main characteristic of education in the past century has been its expansion: a major stratification research question associated with this is whether the inequalities of education opportunities among classes have persisted or changed (diminished) over time. The educational transition model (Mare 1980,1981), adopted by the majority of scholars in the filed , separates thestudy of allocation, that is class inequality in education, from distribution, the maount of schooling and its expansion, using conditional logits. A consequence of the way this istinction has influenced subsequent research has been he emergence of a sharp gap between macro-level research on the expansion of education and stratification studies.This paper proposes to re-integrate research on allocation and distribution using cumulative logits (McCullagh 1980) to anlyse the relation between class of origin and educational attainment. Such analyses provide explicit parameters for educational expansion as well as a measure of class inequalities in educational opportunities. A model for educational expansion leading to the logistic curve is sketched, and the relation between e cumulative logit analysis and the considitional logits of the educational transition model is anlysed. Empirically the Italian case is considered, where the cumulative logit analysis show diminishing class inequalitiesof educational opportunities, contrary to most of the previous literature. The difference, as it turns out, lies more in the interpretation than in the actual empirical results