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I have been following the discussion of the Italian-American educational record with some concern because it continues to reflect outdated ideas, which are in fact pretty close to stereotypes, about the limited educational and occupational horizons of Italian Americans, especially those of later generations.

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There is very good evidence that Italian Americans have broken out of the peasant and working-class molds that may have constrained their educational ambitions a half century ago.  When the educational attainments of young, US-born Italian Americans, the group that represents the recent "life chances" of Italians, are separated from their elders, whose education may have been completed decades ago, there is not a substantial difference between Italians and other whites.  If anything, Italians are a little more likely to go to college, probably because they are concentrated in areas of the country where educational levels are high.  This doesn't mean of course that every Italian-American child is going to get a college education;  some are going to take blue-collar jobs, but the same is true for other whites.

If we look to education for the professions and the academy as the real measure of the group's educational achievements, Italian Americans still do rather well.  By comparison with their proportion of the population, Italians are overrepresented in key professions--the law and medicine.  They are now almost at parity in their representation among college and university instructors with Ph.D.'s.  (These data appear in an article I published in the journal Ethnicities in June, 2006.) They continue to be underrepresented among the faculty at elite universities, but this, I think, is not a matter of limited achievements by Italian Americans but rather of their exclusion on the basis of their ethnic and religious background.