Educational Qualifications Yields as Employment Risk: an Empirical Analysis on the Horizontal Inequality

The analysis of horizontal inequalities in the educational yields has recently raised an increasing interest, as they explain a larger portion of the inequalities in the labour market, both in terms of wages and in terms of employment risk. This paper analyses the horizontal inequalities in terms of one-year employment risk for bachelor and master’s graduates between 2009 and 2013 at the University of Trento (Italy). It is studied the employment situation of students one year after graduation, distinguishing between those who are unemployed, those whose job is consistent with their academic career, and those whose job is at all different from studies. It is also considered the portion of graduates who are involved in an internship, as this seems to have become an important way of access to the Italian job market. In order to describe both the multiplicity of the employment situations and the hierarchical clustering of graduates with respect to their degree courses, data are modelled by means of multilevel multilogit models. The analysis is based both on administrative data of the University of Trento and on results of the periodic surveys on Italian graduates conducted by the Italian intercollegiate consortium Almalaurea; this allows us to assess the effect of the regularity of the educational path, the time of graduation, the final mark and other characteristics of students’ academic careers on their employment situation one year after graduation.