This project will comprehensively map out the status quo in terms of the conceptual definitions and partial data sources relating migration and education, their comparability, and existing attempts to reconcile them.

Migration is increasingly seen as important to understanding international development in other sectors, including education. At the same time, the public discourse around migration is highly politicised and suffers from numerous misunderstandings and misperceptions based partly in a dearth of robust data and analysis. In the field of education, most existing research focuses on micro-level or policy analyses regarding the school experiences and outcomes of migrant children, for example, or on the aggregate economic and labour market impacts of high-skilled migration specifically. Ironically, the more elementary interactions of migration with population dynamics and overall educational expansion have remained underexplored.

IIASA together with its Wittgenstein Centre (IIASA, VID/ÖAW, WU) partners have a strong record of research in both of these areas and in projections of educational expansion and of population projections disaggregated by educational attainment, having recently analysed these in the context of the Sustainable Development (SDG) Agenda for the GEMR 2016. It is therefore exceptionally well-placed to produce novel investigations of the interaction of migration and education at the global level. The proposed project can also take advantage of synergies with the Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration recently-established by IIASA together with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (ERC-JRC).

The proposed report will include the following parts:

  • A comprehensive review of data sources and gaps
  • Scenarios for education-specific future migration flows
  • An analysis of population-level interactions