Conference Program

Educational inequality and educational poverty can be conceptualized—and consequently addressed—from different analytical perspectives. The most common approach focuses on the formal completion of basic levels of schooling. Traditionally, this has been operationalized through indicators such as early school leaving rates or the share of students who fail to obtain an upper secondary diploma or vocational qualification.

Over the last decades, however, increasing attention has been paid to the limits of this perspective. With the development of the knowledge society, education is increasingly understood as a continuous process extending across the entire life course. In societies and economies characterized by rapid and constant transformation, opportunities for learning no longer coincide solely with formal schooling. As a result, educational inequalities may emerge at different stages of individual trajectories and involve multiple dimensions of learning.

This shift has generated renewed interest in inequalities in access to and completion of tertiary education. In this field, alongside traditional attention to class-based inequalities, growing attention has been devoted to gender differences in access to specific fields of study, often intersecting with other factors such as citizenship status or territorial disparities. At the same time, increasing attention has been directed toward the effective skills and resources acquired through educational processes. The recognition that formal credentials alone are insufficient to guarantee meaningful life opportunities has led to the development of new systems of evaluation and measurement focusing on students’ actual competences and skills, such as the implicit dropout indicators proposed by INVALSI.

Within this framework, educational poverty can be conceptualized as a multidimensional phenomenon measurable through a plurality of indicators.

However, the theoretical and empirical implications of this multidimensionality remain only partially explored. More specifically, there is no reason to assume that the same risk factors operate uniformly across different dimensions of educational disadvantage.

This issue becomes particularly relevant when considering the intersection between different vulnerability factors, such as social class, gender, citizenship, or territorial location. While in relatively shrinking phenomena such as early school leaving the most disadvantaged profiles often accumulate multiple risk factors, this pattern may not hold in expanding or emerging domains such as implicit school dispersion, unequal skills acquisition, or access to lifelong learning opportunities.

Drawing on available empirical evidence, this contribution offers an exploratory analysis of the intersections—technically, interactions—between key risk factors associated with educational poverty across four domains: early school leaving, implicit school dispersion, access to tertiary education, and participation in lifelong learning. By comparing these dimensions, the paper aims to highlight how the configuration of educational inequalities may vary across different stages of the educational trajectory. In doing so, the study discusses how evaluation frameworks can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of educational disadvantage and support policies aimed at expanding equitable learning opportunities. More broadly, improving the evaluation of educational inequalities represents a key step toward strengthening democratic participation, as access to meaningful learning opportunities constitutes a fundamental condition for active citizenship and inclusive democratic societies.