Parental wealth and children’s higher education: Italy in a comparative perspective

The study of household wealth as a distinct dimension of social stratification is crucial to understand the main factors and mechanisms driving the intergenerational reproduction of inequalities in contemporary societies. This dissertation aims to contribute to the expanding literature on wealth inequalities by investigating the role played by parental wealth in shaping children’s educational opportunities. More specifically, the dissertation concentrates on three main research axes. First, it investigates the relevance of wealth gaps in education in Italy, a country that received little attention in the literature so far. In doing so, it evaluates wealth gaps in the attainment of upper secondary degrees, in the enrolment at university, and in the attainment of tertiary degrees. Second, it aims to clarify the various roles played by different levels and components of parental wealth in providing children with advantages in educational outcomes. In this regard, it provides a theoretical reflection linking potential wealth mechanisms to the combination of levels and components of wealth and it empirically evaluates their relevance in the transition to post-secondary education. Third, it explores whether and how wealth gaps in education vary across different national contexts. Broad international comparisons are still missing in the literature and single-country studies are hardly comparable. To this purpose, this dissertation aims at evaluating wealth gaps in the access to post-secondary education across 14 European countries while also accounting for the relative importance of different wealth components.