Conference Program

This paper focuses on the channel of non-university professional tertiary education in Italy, specifically addressing the Higher Technical Institutes (ITS) established in 2008 and operational since 2010. Recently reformed under the law 99/2022 and renamed Higher Technological Institutes - ITS Academy, these institutions have received a significant investment of 1.5 billion euros through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).

The authors conducted interviews with key figures, namely Presidents and Directors, analyzing nine active ITS across the entire national territory—five in the North, two in the Center, and two in the South. The interviewed Foundation Presidents predominantly bring professional experience from the business world, with a minority having backgrounds in academia or professional training.

The surveyed ITS primarily focus on the technological areas of Sustainable Mobility and New Technologies for Made in Italy, representing the sectors with the highest number of students, established ITS, and educational paths. The study aims to deepen the understanding of ITS operations, utilizing literature and available official documentation.

Generally, ITS attract students aged 19 to 24, with a minority over 40. The teaching staff is mainly sourced from the productive sector, secondary schools, or academia. ITS typically adopt a lean and flexible organizational structure, often attributed to limited resources and challenges in planning and programming. Except for specific cases, a relatively weak connection with secondary schools and universities is evident.

Based on the collected data, an exploratory classification proposes three ideal models of ITS: i) industry-driven ITS; ii) self-driven ITS; iii) secondary-school-driven ITS. A common characteristic across all cases is the strong link between the ITS and its local territory.

In the first model, businesses directly influence educational paths by participating in program definition, teaching, and organizing internships. This model typically involves a close connection with one or more medium to large-sized enterprises, with the productive sector playing a crucial role in educational program planning. In the second model, smaller or family-run businesses have a relevant but less structured role, while in the third model, secondary schools determine educational offerings by mediating with the productive fabric. The social, cultural, and economic specificities of the areas where ITS operate likely influence the adoption of a particular model. Economically developed territories tend to favor the first model (significant business involvement in educational program planning), while those characterized by more dispersed economic actors tend to prefer the other two ideal types (less structured business contributions in the second model and a significant role for secondary schools in the third model).

This paper analyses the institutional determinants that regulate the transitions from secondary to tertiary education of young people’s in Europe, by advancing our understanding how the structures of different education and training systems interact with educational choice by students. The aim is to provide scholars of European comparative education with new comparative insights into the institutional pathways of transitions into tertiary education (both academic-general and vocational). Individual characteristics such as family educational background, occupational status of parents, gender and immigrant background, determine different participation rates into tertiary education. We will use microdata found in the EU SILC 2019 survey coordinated by EUROSTAT to map patterns of educational choice by students in 31 European countries. Our starting point is to identify relevant institutional dimensions, such as tracking in secondary schools, public and private spending, school autonomy and accountability, and other structures of educational systems, in order to build clusters and distinguish regimes of socio-economic and institutional factors that interact with individual agency. Our model distinguishes five regimes (Universalistic, Employment-Based, Familistic, Post-Communist, Market-based), based on welfare regimes by Esping Andersen (1990). The paper compares and explain the drivers of the relationship between different types of transition regimes and participation patterns of young people’s into tertiary education. A small-n case study analysis of five prototypes (Sweden, Italy, Poland, UK, and Germany) will complement the quantitative analysis performed in the paper, in order to develop an in-depth discussion of selected aspects of education systems. Using a mixed-method methodology, the descriptive quantitative analysis will be accompanied by qualitative country specific and context-sensitive discussion of the institutional effects of different transition regimes clusters. Our findings suggest that transition regimes show marked differences across-clusters and across-countries with regards to the efficiency and equity of participation to tertiary education.

This paper explores the returns to tertiary vocational education in Italy, with a specific focus on employment, wage, and the skill match between the field of study and subsequent occupation. Italy faces challenges such as a high percentage of young adults Not in Employment, Education, or Training (NEETs) and a low share of the population with tertiary education attainment. Italy introduced Higher Technical Institutes (ITS) to address these issues in 2011, offering tertiary vocational education similar to US Community Colleges but with unique features. The ITS courses are managed by foundations, including local public administrations and private companies, ensuring a connection to the local labor market. Based on various parameters, quality assessment is conducted by an external national agency, and top-performing ITS courses receive additional funds.

Using a novel dataset covering ITS students in Lombardy from 2011 to 2019, the paper employs a counterfactual study design, comparing employment outcomes of ITS graduates with those who dropped out after the first year. The study finds that receiving an ITS diploma increases the likelihood of employment by 16 percentage points, improves the skill gap between field-of-study and occupational requirements by 8 percentage points and significantly increases wages. The effects are more pronounced for males and in certain fields like biotechnology, ICT, and manufacturing.

The research contributes to the literature on labor-market returns of vocational tertiary programs, providing new evidence for Italy's unique tertiary education system. It also investigates the role of course quality in influencing employment outcomes, highlighting the importance of quality assessment in shaping employment returns and skill mismatches. Our results show that the effects of ITS vary based on the official quality assessments of the courses. The public evaluation of ITS courses is a distinctive feature of the Italian system. Overall, our results suggest that students who complete a high-quality ITS course have greater employment prospects and narrower skill gaps..

Tertiary Vocational Education and Training (VET) has been introduced in Italy in 2011, when the first Higher Technical Institutes (Istituti Tecnici Superiori, ITS) started offering their courses. The main aim of this type of education is to increase the level of tertiary education in the population while reducing the skill mismatch in local labour markets (Cedefop, 2018).

The Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) emphasizes the strategic role of ITS for local development, strengthening the links of ITS (renamed Istituti Tecnologici Superiori or ITS academy) with Industry 4.0, and highlighting the role of ITS as providers for specific technical skills able to enhance socio-economic growth at the local level.

Recent international research has emphasized the impact of tertiary VET on individual labour market performance (Bockerman et al., 2018; Carruthers and Sanford, 2018; Jepsen et al. 2014; Stevens et al., 2019; Auceio et al., 2023), but little is known about their effects on economic and social development od the regions where tertiary VET institutes are located and their graduates are likely to work.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of ITS on local development. More specifically, we leverage on heterogeneity across provinces and over time of ITS foundations to study whether the presence of an ITS foundation influences firm demography (i.e., firm creation and destruction), especially in industries overlapping the technological areas covered by ITS courses, and local labour market performance, especially in terms of youth unemployment, the NEET rate and firms’ skill shortages.

The empirical analysis is based on province-level (and local labour market sustem-level) panel data from 2007 to 2023, combining information on different sources. “Treated” provinces are those with an ITS foundation in a certain year, while the control group includes all the provinces without an ITS foundation in that year. Results of the analysis will help to understand whether and how ITS can act as economic and social multipliers, producing positive spillovers not only on the companies involved in ITS foundations or courses, but on the economy and society as a whole.

Expected social benefits are related to reduced drop-out rates from education/training, lower youth unemployment and inactivity rates and shorter school to work transitions, with important long run effects in terms of reduced social expenditures (for unemployment and income support) if a lower drop-out rate reduces the poverty risks in adult life.

The increase in life expectancy, multimorbidity and chronic diseases, and the consequent demand for health and social work staff, has long been an important pull factor for immigration in many countries (Bartely et al., 2012). As several studies show, in Italy too, care work has been a favoured entry channel for first-generation immigrants with low qualifications (Colombo e Catanzaro, 2011; Boccagni, 2016).

Indeed, the so-called 'care drain' phenomenon (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Bettio et al. 2006) is gradually changing in the direction of both attracting more qualified professionals from abroad (Schilgen et al. 2017) and stimulating domestic supply. In Italy, the Covid-19 pandemic opened a debate on the need to recruit health workers of foreign nationality to cover staff shortages, highlighting the long-standing paradox between the growing demand for qualified migrant care workers and the existing barriers to legal and social recognition (Ranci et al., 2021). The recent crisis also highlights the need for more knowledge about the presence of highly skilled individuals with a migration background in the care sector in order to understand the changes that are reshaping the care sector and our societies as a whole.

Against this backdrop, our research focuses on migrants and children of migrants in education and training for care professions. Building on previous research on people with a migrant background in higher education (Bertozzi and Lagomarsino, 2019; Bozzetti, 2021; Heath et al. 2008) or in prestigious professional and social positions (Crul et al., 2017), we explore the motivations that drive and the resources that support the choice of care as an educational and professional field. As part of a multi-method research on students from migrant backgrounds at the Sapienza University of Rome, this paper presents preliminary findings from over 20 qualitative interviews with students enrolled in first degree programmes in social work and health professions. In line with international trends, our research shows that the care sector is increasingly a privileged choice for the children of immigrants in higher education. Besides the opportunities for integration and social mobility that it offers, however, this choice appears to be in continuity with the vocational choices prevalent among second generation students, demonstrating that the persistence of processes of 'subaltern integration' (Ambrosini, 2001) remains critical thus requiring further investigation and targeted education policies.

From the 1960s and 1970s onward, a process of differentiation in higher education became a hallmark in numerous European countries. However, this phenomenon was notably absent in Italy, where it only commenced in the 1990s. This article offers a historical contextualization of endeavors to institute tertiary vocational education channel within the Italian educational framework. Subsequently, it undertakes an exploratory analysis of distinctive features in comparison to the vocational tertiary education systems of Germany and France. The paper focuses on the non-academic sector analyzing the Istituti tecnici superiori (ITS), which, although currently occupying a marginal role in tertiary vocational education, has been identified by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) as a pivotal driver for economic and generational advancement. The ITS system, recently rebranded ITS Academy, has been conspicuous by the absence of a stable and precise theoretical underpinning. Conversely, it has been characterized by recurrent organizational and managerial adjustments that have proven inadequate in addressing its inherent structural challenges. The paper concludes with a reflection on potential trajectories for ITS Academies, particularly considering the recent 99/2022 reform, which offers limited prospects for substantive innovation.