Inequality of educational opportunity in Italy:how fair is the “3+2" reform?

In this paper we propose a de_nition of fairness in education which is based onthe theory of equality of opportunity developed in the last decades in the philosophical and economic literature (Roemer,1998; Fleurbaey, 2008), we derive opportunity inequality measures based on such conceptual framework, and we use these measures to evaluate the 1999 reform of the Italian university system (the so called “3+2" reform). Looking at 1995-2004 college graduates data our estimates show an improvement in the equality of opportunity in the access to university. However, the aggregated data available for the 2005-2008 suggest that such a positive e_ect may vanish in the medium run.