The educational consequences of migration for children in China

Recent research literature on migration in China has mainly focused on adult migrants. As more and more people participate in the migration process and as migrants expand the duration of their stays in cities, migrant children increasingly become part of the migration stream. The presence of large numbers of migrant children in cities, especially children without local hukou, creates major problems for their parents and challenges for education policy-makers. In this paper, we examine the school enrollment of migrant children who resided in cities of Guangdong province in 1995. Using data from the 1995 China 1% Population Sample Survey, we apply a research strategy that incorporates both migration origin as well as destination. This allows us to estimate school enrollment rates for temporary migrant children, permanent migrant children, and local children, in addition to nonmigrant children at the place of origin. Two major Wndings emerge from multivariate analyses of school enrollment. First, temporary migrant children are much less likely to be enrolled in school compared to local children. Temporary migrants with less than one year of residence in cities suVer the most. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, permanent migrant children are more likely to be enrolled in school than local children due largely to the highly selective nature of their parents. Second, compared to non-migrant children at the place of origin, rural temporary migrant children from Guangdong also encounter a major disadvantage in terms of school enrollment. As education becomes more and more important for socio-economic mobility in the Chinese society, such disadvantages faced by temporary migrant children is likely to have detrimental and long-term consequences for migrant children and for urban society as a whole. This project is supported by a FIRST Award (1R29HD34878) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We thank Richard Alba, Don Hernandez, John Logan, Steve Messner, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper. * Corresponding author. Fax: +1 518 442 4936. E-mail address: [email protected] (Z. Liang). 1