Patterns di ingresso nel mondo del lavoro e mobilità occupazionale: profili di coerenza in “Indicatori e metodologie per la valutazione dell’efficacia del sistema universitario” a cura di D.F. Iezzi, Cleup, Padova, 2011, pag. 141-156

The amount of employed graduates has proved a partial insufficient measure of the external efficacy of higher education, urging its integration with the assessment of the consistency of graduates’ jobs with their university curricula . This merge can be accomplished by means of indicators that quantify the concept of ‘good work’. To this regard, surveys on the occupation of graduates, in particular STELLA involving the majority of universities in Lombardy, gain a wide perspective, since the working graduate is an “informed expert” both on university educational procedures and on actual entries in companies. Our paper proposes to measure the quality of work by the identification of a structure of synthetical macrocomponents of job features, both objective and subjective. Since information on these features are measured by means of items on different scales, categorical, ordinal and quantitative, a suitable methodology is non linear PCA (Categorical Principal Component Analysis, CATPCA), an optimal scaling technique belonging to multivariate non linear analy-ses that has been successfully applied to the satisfaction at work. The explorative ap-plication shows that graduates regard not only traditional objective measure, income in the first place, as constitutive elements of the quality of their jobs, but also self re-alization and life project continuity.