Interazioni, interdipendenze e stratificazione educativa

A formal model of educational decision-making is presented, the aim of which is to generate the essential characteristics of the empirical aggregate patterns of educational stratification. The so-called “Interdependent Educational Choice Model” (IECM) purports to integrate three kinds of social mechanisms: a/ generative mechanisms of the link between actor’s origin group and his individual evaluations of the social returns, costs and risks of educational investment; b/ generative mechanisms of the link between actor’s origin group, social networks and individual evaluation of educational degrees; c/ generative mechanisms of the link between certain elements of the actor’s decision-making function and social aggregates that actors themselves create dynamically. The mathematical form of the IECM fits into the framework of discrete choice models with externalities. The claim is that agent-based computational simulation is the most suitable technique for studying aggregate implications of models that formalize such kind of generative mechanisms. The educational stratification generated by agent-based simulation of the IECM is then presented and compared to cross-sectional empirical data for Italy and France in the 1990s. It is suggested that the mechanisms formalized in IECM generate educational stratification that is structurally homologous to empirical stratification of these two countries by triggering an “amplification process” driven by a “cumulative advantage process”. Lastly, the author studies the artificial aggregate educational stratification generated by manipulating characteristics of the network that IECM agents are located in, particularly, locale density, structure of heterophily links and proportion of these links. In conclusion, the main limitations of the IECM and, more generally, the “validity problem” for results achieved with agent-based simulation are discussed