Is university education worth the investment? The expectations of upper secondary school seniors and the role of family background

Abstract

This study assesses students' expectations about the profitability of the investment in university education. We consider Italy as a test case and provide fresh highquality data on students' expectations concerning the costs, economic returns and chances of success of this investment. These are compared with data on the corresponding actual values. We find that the estimates provided by upper secondary school seniors are highly inaccurate, highly uncertain and systematically biased. Students overestimate the returns to university degrees, while they are over-pessimistic regarding university costs and drop-out risks. These results confirm previous studies on perceived university costs, but they challenge the dominant view that students can realistically forecast graduate earnings. We trace this discrepancy to two methodological shortcomings of several previous studies on expected graduate earnings. Moreover, we find that information barriers are not equally distributed among social groups. High-status students overestimate the economic returns to university more, and they are more optimistic regarding their chances of success in Higher Education, even after allowing for their higher

The Role of Career Adaptability, the Tendency to Consider Systemic Challenges to Attain a Sustainable Development, and Hope to Improve Investments in Higher Education

“…Beliefs concerning the field of university education that underestimate its benefits lead young people to be less motivated to invest in a university path. This is, most of all, due to superficial gatherings of information and frequent use of heuristic (Abbiati and Barone, 2017). This is a worrying situation in the current context, in which higher education has become essential to prepare young people who will soon become adults and will have to face the current difficulties of the labor market and the above-mentioned global challenges (Guichard, 2018).…”

Universities’ attractiveness to students: The Darwinism effect

“…Families, nowadays, have concrete tools to enable more selective choices due to a faster and easier access to information (e.g., Internet but also university rankings; see Hazelkorn, ) facilitating information searching and decision making (Simões & Soares, ). However, these may not be sufficient to avoid students and families having overly optimistic expectations concerning the expected returns to investment in Higher Education (Abbiati & Barone, ). This investment nowadays (for students and their families) is one that remits to the idea of Darwinism, in the sense that attending Higher Education is not enough as it became a quasi‐necessity (Marginson, ).…”

Information barriers and social stratification in higher education: evidence from a field experiment

“…Moreover, we expect that the informal circulation of information about university education and its functioning is hindered in countries with a low presence of tertiary graduates, as is the case of Italy (OECD ). Indeed, two recent studies report that Italian students have a poor knowledge of the system of HE (Abbiati and Barone ; Barone, Schizzerotto, Abbiati and Argentin ). On the one hand, they overestimate university costs considerably and have limited awareness of financial aid opportunities, in line with findings reported for other Western countries (Grodsky and Jones ).…”

“…Indeed, while some studies report a positive relationship between social position and information about university education (Usher ; Betts ), others report that upper‐class students and parents are just as poorly informed about it as the rest of the population (Avery and Kane ). Regarding Italy, the above‐described information biases are only partly unrelated to family background (Abbiati and Barone )…”