The Effect of Migrating on Young People's Education: A Cross-National Analysis

Abstract

Despite longstanding scholarly interest in migrant academic achivement, there has been little work to isolate an effect of migrating on student outcomes. This paper harnesses a causal inference framework to evaluate the effect of migration on young migrants' learning outcomes on a global scale. This paper uses test score data come from the 2012, 2015, and 2018 Programme for Student Assessment to compare 10,974 migrants in 42 destination countries to 616,446 counterparts in 56 countries of origin. Multilevel techniques developed for meta-analysis are used to aggregate effect estimates for each country pair and test the effects of country-level mediators. Results vary greatly by country, but generally migrant students tend to perform slightly worse on these exams than similar stay-at-homes in their countries of origin. Furthermore, when children migrate to wealthier countries they tend to outperform stay-at-homes, and between-school tracking is associated with lower achievement relative to stay-at-homes.