Abstract

The paper is intended to contribute to the current sociological debate on possible variations over time in the influence exerted by individuals' social origins on their educational attainments. The analyses are based on the 2005 Italian section of EU-SILC, and they follow Bukodi and Goldthorpe's approach. Specifically, the article seeks to determine whether the influence of parental class, parental education, and parental status on the highest level of schooling attained by Italians born in three different periods of the twentieth century have changed, or whether they have remained stable. OLS regression models are used to answer this question,. They show that: i) parental class, parental status, and parental level of schooling have independent effects on individuals' educational levels; ii) parental schooling is the most influential factor on persons' school attainments, followed by parental prestige and parental class; and iii) the influence of parental class has remained absolutely stable across birth cohorts, both among men and women, while the effects of parental education have diminished for both genders, and those of parental status have slightly declined only for women.