Abstract
The social environment each individual is exposed to during childhood contributes to molding personality and aspirations. Children living in deprived areas or neighborhoods receive fewer stimuli as they often attend lower-quality schools and interact less with inspiring adults. These interactions potentially lower their ambitions, aspirations, and their beliefs about future life opportunities. We design a cost-effective school intervention targeting 13-year-old students. The intervention consists in exposing children to online meetings with a group of role models, namely individuals who are now successful and influential in their profession/activities. The aim is to test whether the intervention improves children’s aspirations and ambitions. We run the intervention in the Italian region of Campania as this region is historically plagued by stagnating economic conditions, the presence of organized crime, and a generalized lack of trust in institutions. These features might shape discouragement about life opportunities and lower ambitions in many children living in these areas. Unsurprisingly, dropout rate in this region is dramatically higher than in other areas of the country: more than 18 per cent of the population aged 18-24 has completed, at most, lower secondary education, a value that is five percentage points higher than the national average.