Italy is the penultimate in Europe for the number of young people with a tertiary qualification. But education must once again be the mainspring of social mobility. Human capital as a possible field of action for a resilient exit from the current emergency phase. The study of our country's reaction to the pandemic continues with the third Agi-Censis report dedicated to the world of universities.
Although enrollments have started to grow again, much remains to be done to bridge the gap that separates us from the major European countries. In fact, 7 more enrollments would be needed every year to be in line with the European average. The national university system, which has overall managed to contain the shockwave of the pandemic, must be helpedremoving internal and external criticalities, also because education plays a decisive role in increasing social mobility of an individual. This is what emerges from the third Agi-Censis relationship, developed as part of the project «Italy under stress. 2020 transition diary", Which aims to analyze the difficulties that Italy carries with it from the past, the uncovered nerves that have led to the unpreparedness to better face the emergency linked to the Covid-19 epidemic, to look constructively to the future .
In the 2019-2020 academic year, the increase in enrollments at Italian universities was confirmed: + 3,2% compared to the previous year. After a decade of contractions, the positive trend that began with the 2014-2015 academic year has continued. In the last academic year, the condition of being a university student united 51,8% of young Italians of the same age, compared to an EU 28 average of 58,7%. For Italy, equaling the European average by 2025 would mean being able to count on an average annual increase in enrollments of 2,2%, equivalent in absolute value to about 7.000 more students, or 2,6% if the goal were to reach the share of registrations in France (+8.500 people per year). Translated into monetary terms, this growth can be estimated in a volume of additional expenditure, in the first case, of over 49 million euros each year and, in the second, of 59 million.
But let's start from a disadvantage: Italy is penultimate in Europe for the number of young people with a tertiary qualification. In 2019, Italians aged between 25 and 34 with a tertiary education qualification were 27,7% of the total, or 13,1 percentage points less than the EU 28 average, equal to 40,8%. The figure places us in the penultimate position: after Italy only Romania, with 25,5%.
The low share of young people with a tertiary qualification is also a consequence of the reduced availability of short-cycle and vocational tertiary courses, university and non-university, which is more widespread abroad than in Italy. It is therefore necessary to organize a wider and more articulated system of provision of tertiary education. The rate of transition from upper secondary school to university in the academic year 2018-2019 was equal to 50,4% of students who graduated in the same year. The remainder who did not enroll at university (49,6%) mostly sought a job and presumably continued with post-secondary or tertiary study paths alternative to university.
Education plays a decisive role in increasing social mobility, that is the possibility that an individual has to realize his or her potential, regardless of his socio-economic background. The Global Social Mobility Index 2020 places Italy in 34th place in an international ranking calculated on 82 countries, after Israel and before Urugay, but far from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which occupy the first three positions. For some time in our country, university education has reduced its power as the main engine of social mobility. The latest available data indicate that Italians aged 30-44 with university degrees and parents without a corresponding qualification are only 13,9%, compared to an OECD average of 32,3%. Therefore, adequate guidance interventions, investments and resources for the right to education are needed to guarantee equal opportunities for all.
In 2018, 0,3% of GDP was spent on tertiary education in Italy, less than in all the other 27 EU Member States. In the 2018-2019 academic year only 11,7% of those enrolled were beneficiaries of a scholarship, a share that is not distributed territorially in a uniform way (it drops to 9,1% in the North-West and in the Center and rises 13,4% in the North-East and 15,3% in the South). Once again the distance that separates Italy from the other EU member states emerges. The reduced disbursement of scholarships puts the investment in university education on the families of origin of the students, whose incomes, already eroded in the years of the economic crisis, are further compromised by the pandemic.