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Education and Migration

Education is an important source of social change. It promotes vertical and spatial mobility and changes the worldview of those who possess it. It pushes vertical mobility by changing upward occupational status and related roles an individual is expected to perform. It pushes spatial mobility among those who want to achieve it because education opens better socio-economic opportunities for them.

The educational advancement is more meaningful it opportunities are available and the educational achievement becomes the axis of the distribution of opportunities.

Education serves as a symbol of social status and a source of white-collar jobs. It is due to such social and economic utilities of education that the desire to achieve it usually entails migration. The incentives in education create a self-motivated desire among the young people to be educated.

The migration inducing impact of education depends on the availability and the distribution of education. The desire to achieve available education is contingent upon the resources of the family. The studies have shown that the inequality in the resources of families is closely related with the inequality in the level and the distribution of education. They reinforce each other and jointly push the process of migration.

The educational achievement of rural youth is promoting a kind of attitude and desire that alienates them from their village of origin because village life becomes incompatible with their education. This is also a reason that the rural youth are moving to urban areas. This shows a brain-drain tendency among the educated rural youth towards the urban areas like the labor drain tendency of the non-educated youth to migrate to cities. The young educated migrants usually aim at ling term migration for better educational and employment prospects in achievement oriented modern formal sectors in urban areas. The non-educated illiterates or barely literate migrants aim at short-term casual opportunities in unorganized informal sectors.

The educated female migration is almost insignificant which shows that even among educated women the movement is restricted because of social sanctions on their moving out to earn a living and because the investment on their education is not considered as gainful as compared with men. There is gender bias in making educational investment more on males because of the view that they have greater social and economic importance.

The gender bias of this kind promotes gender based educational disparity. The eradication of educational inequality, promotion of economic and social incentives for educational development and the creation of more jobs and educational opportunities are necessary requirements for making education a stronger motivating factor for migration.