High School Choices by Immigrant Students in Italy: Evidence from Administrative Data

Aktaş Koray (), Argentin Gianluca (), Gian Paolo Barbetta, Luca Colombo and Barbieri Gianna ()
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Aktaş Koray: Department of Economics, Management and Statistics, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Center for European Studies (CefES), Milan, Italy
Argentin Gianluca: Department of Sociology and Social Research, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
Barbieri Gianna: Direzione Generale per i Contratti, Gli Acquisti e per i Sistemi Informativi e la Statistica, MIUR, Rome, Italy

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2022, vol. 22, issue 3, 527-572

Abstract: We investigate the educational choices of first- and second-generation immigrant students at the transition between lower-secondary school and high school by exploiting a large longitudinal dataset of about 50,000 students in Italy. We find that immigrant students are less likely to choose challenging academic track high schools compared with their Italian counterparts, after controlling for household characteristics, school fixed effects, and students’ performance. We show that systematic differences in teachers’ feedback received by the two groups of students are an important driver of the observed differences in educational choices by immigrant and native students. In addition, after controlling for observable characteristics, we find that immigrant students are more likely to be formally advised by their teachers to choose vocational or technical high schools rather than academic tracks, especially in the case of female students, reflecting a discrimination bias that has not previously been emphasized in the literature. This suggests the role for a new dimension of policy intervention aimed at reducing the possibility of teachers’ induced discrimination based on implicit stereotypes.

Keywords: immigrant students; high school choice; academic track; discrimination biases; implicit stereotypes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 I26 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2021-0339

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