Opportunity and discrimination in tertiary education: a proposal of aggregation for some European countries

Several studies underline the relationship between education achievement and socioeconomic outcomes. Higher education is associated with improved health, higher incomes earned and greater possibilities of establishment in the labour market. For these reasons, there is an increasing interest in analysing education achievement. Among OECD countries, there is a great disparity in the education achievement, in particular for what concern tertiary education. Looking at individuals aged 30-44-year-olds, adults from highly educated families more often complete tertiary-education compared with adults whose parents have not a tertiary education. There are two distinct aspects to be investigated: opportunity and discrimination. Opportunity refers to the probability, for an adult, in getting degree. Discrimination refers to the difference of opportunity between adult with different family status. We use data from the OECD’s publication “Education at a Glance 2017” (the reference year is 2015) and, among the OECD counties, we focus on the EU15 countries. The selected countries are compared according to an index of discrimination and an index of opportunity, respectively. In addition, we propose a new index that accounts simultaneously for the two dimensions.