A mapping of the current phenomenon of continual social mobility reduction shows university training as having an extremely important role, since successfully completing a good post-secondary education is one of the essential prerequisites for improving social status and economic prosperity.
However, in the light of the statistical trends of recent years in Italy, this “elevator” seems to have stalled. The average annual number of young graduates in Italy has not risen for some years now (stable at 27%) as the European average steadily grows. This gap widens when foreign students are taken into consideration: only 12.8% of 30-somethings in this group in Italy hold a university degree, compared with the European average of 38.7%. These key differences inevitably reflect also on the domestic job market, where only 80% of 30-somethings are employed nationally, against the European average of 87.7%.
In this framework of unexpressed educational and professional potential, a fundamental role in offering greater job market opportunity is played by what are known as the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. Indeed, thanks to increasingly rapid and ambitious technological development, it is undeniable that those disciplines are more in demand on national and international job markets and are also in continuous evolution. Nevertheless, even this macro-educational sector continues to produce statistical differences in comparison with other European nations. Italy still shows a strong gender disadvantage, with only 16.7% of women holding STEM degrees, as opposed to 37.3% of men. Moreover, the number of men employed professionally in these areas is lower than the European average by approximately 3 to 4 percentage points.
These figures underscore how Italy’s educational system is misaligned with job market demand. Universities and secondary schools should be directly oriented toward meeting the contemporary needs of the job market, and students should be much more aware of the relationship between the supply and demand of individual professional sectors. Only in this way will it be possible to reduce the impact of the two most alarming of recent phenomena: a 10-year “brain drain” that has sent 250,000 young Italian graduates to seek work abroad, and university dropout rates that amount to 13.5% annually, or 561,000 young people.
The profile of the modern student, in order to seek and obtain a better chance at social mobility, must include a series of essential features. She/he must have a good perception of job market needs and orient the choice of what to study toward a compromise between personal passion and current employment trends; not be afraid to face geographic mobility, in terms of both education and of work; and must have a spirit of sacrifice and commit to the fight for a more merit-based system. Such attitudes will help to reduce or eliminate those cultural barriers that impede the natural evolution of a different – certainly more fluid and less static – job market paradigm.