The Transition from University to Work - The case of Italy

1
Abstract
This thesis has the aim of studying the occupational condition of the young graduated 
workers in Italy. The first part is a description of the main characteristics of graduated workforce 
and of the common difficulties that newly-graduates have to face during the period of transition 
from university to work. 
Subsequently, there is a description of the most relevant theoretical approach of the 
economic interpretations of the transition university-to-work, the policy approach. Finally, in the 
third part, there is an estimation of the probability for a young graduated of being in a certain 
labour market position after the transition. For this purpose, it has been used a multinomial logit 
regression. The estimation is done for two years – 2005 and 2006 – and considering the same 
cohort of young, precisely considering people between the ages of 21 and 29 for 2005 and people 
between the ages of 22 and 30 for 2006.
5
Introduction
The transition from university to work is an important phase for the working life of a high 
qualified worker. In Italy it is not always simple and without difficulties. The precariousness, the 
difficulty to find a stable work, the effects of the flexibility, the risk of overskilling and/or 
overeducation, the mismatching between labour demand and supply, the effects of the recession 
are only some of the problems that a young qualified worker could meet during his first working 
experience.
This work has the aim to analyse the occupational picture of young graduates in Italy and 
what are their probabilities of being employed or not.
In the first part there are the main descriptive statistics on the youth intellectual 
unemployment in Italy and a general description about the conditions and the occupational 
possibilities of young qualified workers.
Then, after a clarification on the various definitions of the transition and on what are the 
main elements which characterise it, the theory of the policy approaches is briefly described.
In the third and last part, a multinomial logit model is used in order to estimate the 
probability that a young graduate is in a certain occupational status. The possible status are: 
unemployed, permanent employed, temporary employed, voluntary self-employed, non 
voluntary self-employed. The estimation is done for two years – 2005 and 2006 – and considering 
the same cohort of young, precisely considering people between the ages of 21 and 29 for 2005 
and people between the ages of 22 and 30 for 2006. The data come from the survey called Isfol 
Plus (Partecipation Labour Unemployment Survey), for the years 2005-2006. An important 
characteristic of this survey is the absence of proxy for the interviews unlike several family based 
surveys. Another relevant characteristic of Isfol Plus is the definition of the occupational status: 
the person is employed or unemployed or inactive when he defines himself so. The aim is to find 
the perception that everybody has of his own status. This solution of definition is different from 
the traditional classification of occupational status, used for instance by the National Institutes of 
Statistics.  
The data are processed by the software Stata.
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CHAPTER 1
YOUTH GRADUATES AND TRANSITION UNIVERSITY- TO – WORK IN 
ITALY: A BROAD PICTURE
A country shows inclination towards the progress and the change when it is able to 
involve young people in the participation of its social and economic life: the equilibrium among 
different generations is necessary for the demographic stability, for the pension system, but it is 
also helpful to the institutions, since - in this case – they could be better aware of what they 
should change, in order to cope with social and economic evolution.
A first step towards this equilibrium can be the awareness of the youth issues, jointly with 
a new adults' perspective, more willing to adopt and share the more innovative way of thinking 
typical of young people. This situation is quite hard to achieve, especially in those industrialized 
countries where the ageing process of the population is advanced. The Youth has to tackle 
difficulties even in the labour market: hard entry, low quality jobs, precariousness, even if young 
people are graduates searching for an occupation.
Italy is experiencing the same: the search for a job is tough and if it has a positive result, 
too much often the obtained job is not coherent with the degree and the work relationship is 
temporary, established in atypical contractual form. This happens during the years of a person's 
life, which should be the best period to acquire and improve skills and knowledge after the 
university studies.
Opportunities for young people are very few: they either migrate or stay, but in this case, 
the conditions of young workers are so uncertain that they seem not to have any hope for a 
normal future. If this is the picture, what are the problems and the factors which affect 
occupational possibilities of young graduates?
Certainly, the situation is worsening after the crisis, but it is even true that Italy has 
important structural problems, especially the way the youth unemployment is managed.
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1.1 The case of Italy: some data on Italian graduates
Studying the condition of graduates is not very simple after the reform of the University 
system in 2000
1
. This law modified the cycle of tertiary education, dividing it into two levels: the 
first one consists of three years of basic teaching (called Laurea Triennale) and the second level, 
subsequent to the first but not always mandatory, is a more specific educational path (called 
Laurea Specialistica or Magistrale). However, some Faculties were not modified by the reform, 
such as Medicine, Construction Engineering, Law, Pharmacology, Architecture.
In this essay, a person who has a basic tertiary education title is considered a graduate 
worker (that is, in the Italian case, titles as diploma universitario, laurea di primo livello and/or 
higher titles, laurea pre-reform). Precisely, the referential classification of education title is the 
ISCED
2
1: high qualified worker is who has a level of education equal or higher to the level ISCED 
5, or short-cycle tertiary or bachelor (so, for Italy, this is the Laurea Triennale), which is the basic 
level of tertiary education and it includes learning activities in specific field of knowledge 
(academic, professional and/or advanced vocational education). In order to achieve an education 
level equal or higher to ISCED 5 level, it’s necessary to conclude the cycle of secondary education 
(ISCED 3 and 4). ISCED levels subsequent to the 5 are 6,7 and 8, called respectively Bachelor (or 
other equivalent), Master (for instance, in Italy it is Laurea Specialistica or a Second Level Master) 
and doctoral (or other equivalent, as the case of High Specialization School).
The reasons of the reform were mainly due to the necessity of implementation of the 
Bologna Process
3
and to the achievement of some specific targets: reducing the age in which the 
degree is obtained and promoting the specialization of tertiary education, using the first three 
years as a generic path and the following two, to make a sort of specialization. Anyway, it seems 
that these targets have not been reached, because the laurea triennale is not always sufficient as 
education and/or recognised as a complete degree and for this reason it is often necessary to 
obtain a master’s degree (Caroleo, Pastore, 2009). Besides, even after the reform, the tertiary 
Italian system has not acquired some essential characteristics yet. For instance, it has not 
                                               
1
Law 10 february 2000, n.30 (Riforma Berlinguer) and Law 20 march 2003, n.53 (Riforma Moratti).
2
International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), classification made by UNESCO during the first ’70s of last 
century, with the aim of produce a tool useful for comparisons and processing of statistics about education across 
different countries.
3
Bologna Process started with the Declaration on the harmonization of the architecture of the Higher Education System 
in Europe, (Paris, 1998), subscribed by France, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, with the aim to create a common space 
for the tertiary education in Europe, through the harmonisation of the average duration of educational path, fostering 
the mobility among students, recognising equivalence among similar programmes, promoting the system based on 
credits and the homogeneity among university system.
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achieved the efficiency and efficacy of the educational process, especially in the key period of 
transition from university to work: again, Caroleo and Pastore (2009) say that there are not 
conditions which facilitate mobility among educational institutions, at a national and international 
level (and not only for the university, but for lower or higher educational levels, too), neither a 
consistent support to students. They also observe that the age at the degree isn’t reduced yet (for 
the complete cycle 3+2, too). Finally, there is no contiguity with the labour market, since there is 
no sufficient practical and professional training of students.
The analysis of the occupational state in the transition from university to work in Italy can 
be easily confused and uncertain, because there are different kinds of graduates and because, in 
general, many people who have the first level degree show a weak activity of searching for a job, 
since they prefer not to search for a job, in order to concentrate themselves in the studies of the 
second level degree. This behaviour could lead to an overvaluation of the unemployment. This is 
confirmed by the fact that 62% of first level graduates is searching for a job or is employed after
the degree attainment, differently from the 87% of second level graduates (Almalaurea, 2012).
Considering the age range 30 – 34, the 19.8 %
4
of Italian people obtain a university title of 
study (+4.2% with respect to 2004): it is a percentage that confirms the increasing trend of the 
number of graduates in Italy (Figure 1.1), in particular for women. Women represent the larger 
part of population which has a degree, even for different areas of the country (Figure 1.2). 
However, these data are still far from the targets fixed in the agenda of Europe 2020 Strategy
5
, 
especially comparing Italy with other European countries – as Cyprus, France, Belgium, United 
kingdom, Spain - which have already reached the goals in 2012 (Istat, 2012).
                                               
4
This indicator is computed as the percentage of people which have university education over the total population, (in 
the considered age range, 30-34 years).
5
One of the targets of Europe 2020 Strategy is to achieve the level of 40% of young people (30-34 years) with a tertiary 
education.
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0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Male
Female
Total
Figure 1.1: Graduates in Italy, years 2005 -2001 (absolute values, thousands).
(Source: The figure is an elaboration based on the data available on the website http://dati.istat.it)
The university paths show considerable critical situations: in 2009, 17.6% of registered 
students has left studies, 38.1% of students is out-of-course, 62.8% of the degree are attained 
beyond the academic times and the age of more than the 39% of students is 26 years when they 
obtain the degree (Istat, 2009).
The incidence of expenditure on education and training over the GDP (ratio between total 
public expenditure in education and training – including transfers to families and to public and 
private institutions – and gross domestic product) is a signal of how a country invests in the 
improvement of scholastic and educational structures. If we consider Italy, another aspect is the 
insufficient support to the accumulation of human capital: in the 2009 this indicator was equal to 
4.8%, while the average value of the Eu (27 members) is higher of 0.8 percentage points. 
Countries as Sweden, Denmark, Cyprus, United Kingdom and Estonia all have better performance 
(respectively 7.3%, 8%, 7.1%, 6.9%, 7%) (Istat, 2012).
The ratio between public expenditure on education and total public expenditure is an 
indicator about how governments give importance to education if compared with other areas of 
investment: even under this point of view, Italy shows unsatisfactory percentage with 1.7% in 
2008, while the average of OECD countries is 3.0% (OECD, 2011).