ثرات بازار کار بر روی آلما مادر: شواهد در ایتالیا

We use data from a nationally representative survey of Italian graduates to study whether Alma Mater matters for employment and earnings 3 years after graduation. We find that the attended college matters, and that there are important college-related diff

Does the attended college affect the earnings and employment prospects of graduates? This question is particularly important for those households sending their offspring to college and paying part of the cost, and for the government, which often runs universities and needs to know whether and why some institutions are delivering better outcomes than others. Spurred by the interest on the quality of education, a recent literature has investigated the labour market effects of college quality, mainly but not exclusively in the US. Black and Smith (2004) and Brand and Halaby (2003) review the key contributions. The main focus in this literature has been on comparing elite versus non-elite colleges, and the degree of selectivity has been measured either with the average SAT score of the incoming freshmen—in the US—or with the average A-level score of the intake of students—in the UK (see Chevalier & Conlon, 2003). The basic finding of this literature is that college quality matters for labour market outcomes.

Compared to the experience of other developed countries, the system of Italian universities has resisted differentiation. This institutional set-up suggests that the college an individual has graduated from—her Alma Mater—should matter little for labour market performance. In this paper, we have used the data from a nationally representative survey of Italian graduates to study whether this implication is correct. We have found that Alma Mater does matter in the short run, and that college-related differences are large both among regions—the developed North and the less developed South—and within regions, but not large enough to trigger substantial mobility flows from poorly performing to better performing institutions, which is driven by medium and long run considerations. Over the longer time horizon, the uncovered differences are washed away.