Impact of international migration on intergenerational educational mobility in migrant sending households: does socio-economic status matter?

This paper examines the impact of international migration on inter-generational educational mobility (IGEM) among left-behind children in migrant-sending households in the origin. IGEM, measured as the difference in completed education between a parent and child, is a measure of mobility (or persistence) of educational attainments between generations within a household. If migration leads to a higher IGEM, it can be considered as a mechanism that creates a catching up effect in the society, as it enables attainability of aspirations irrespective of the initial distribution of endowments. The study uses data on 15,000 households from the Kerala Migration Survey 2018 and compares the IGEM of households with an international migration experience to those without it and finds the migration of a household member significantly and positively affects intergenerational educational mobility of children in the household. Disaggregating the sample by social and economic groups reveals that this impact is significantly higher in households from the middle and lower-middle income and social groups. However, children from the lowest income quintile and social strata, especially from communities that are educationally most backward, did not register any significant improvement in IGEM due to migration. This indicates that migration acts as a catching up mechanism for the middle strata of the society while it seems to leave the most disadvantaged sections, relatively even more disadvantaged.