Demography and educhescion (which would be education)

We see a sharp decline in enrollments in primary school starting in 2017-18 (reasonable, given that children start it at 6 years old and those who started it in 2016 should have been conceived in 2010-11 and perhaps "placed in the pipeline" at least a year earlier).

After 3 years, in 2020-21, the sharp decline begins to transfer to the average, reasonable given that there had been a bit of a decline even before 2017-18 and after half of the primary cycle we can expect that the The output effect is felt on the next cycle.

The data can be found in the reports available here https://www.miur.gov.it/web/guest/pubblicazioni . They are not consolidated data, because the reports are drawn up at the beginning of the school year, but if there are errors or approximations, it is reasonable to assume that they affect all years in the same way, so the trends should not be altered.

The question: why don't we see a decline on the upper level? Where do the students who are no longer in the system in previous years come from? I don't have a hypothesis but it's certainly a curious fact.

The chilling observation: if we remove from the student count those with non-Italian citizenship, which have increased in this period of time, we have lost 600 thousand Italian students in 10 years, the size of a city like Genoa or Palermo.

Obviously it's a phenomenon you know well, but I wanted to share the pain of having seen first-hand the extent of this (yet another) horror (among other things, it's something I came across quite by chance, because I was looking on the site of the Ministry completely different data…).

In fact, I don't care about anything in that graph. High schools, until proven otherwise, are still compulsory school, so it is unthinkable that they would be accessed by a "clientele" shielded from the economic consequences of the crisis, and as such capable of reproducing!

Do you have an idea of ​​what these trends mean? In particular, perhaps it would be useful to add the detail of citizenship, but even here it would not be clear why the level of enrollment in high school would be supported by non-Italian students, while in middle school and elementary school it would not. But I have to take care of something else. If the topic interests us, we will return to it more calmly.