Abstract:

This paper examines the influence of rural- to urban migration on early school dropout from compulsory education through effects of social capital in a sample of Turkish youth. The loss of community-based sources of social capital is one of the main reasons for lower levels of education of immigrant youth in comparison to native youth in culturally diverse societies. Migration disrupts the socially structured relationships in communities. Social capital theory is key to understand effects of migration on a wide range of educational outcomes. Migration leads to a loss of community-based sources of social capital. Along these lines this paper aims to look at effects of community both at the level of family, neighborhood and school as a provider of social capital in a disrupted environment of migrant children. Migration results in processes such as loss traditional means of livelihood, inability to benefit from citizenship rights, poverty, child labor, and inability to benefit from the right to education. Turkish society has experienced rural-to-urban shifts since the second half the 20th century. The unstable political climate of the 1980s brought a different pattern of migration, namely the internal displacement. Internal displacement took place in Eastern and Southeastern Turkey between 1984 and 1999 due to the armed conflict between Turkish military and the Kurdish population in the region. IDPs who originally had resided in villages were resettled in Eastern and Southeastern city centers and a significant proportion gradually migrated to larger cities in Turkey. The net migration rate out of Southern and Eastern Turkey reached to about 50% of the population at that region. When migrants moved to new environments work became informal and irregular for men; inability of men to find work placed a burden on women and children. Families stopped to send their children to school to minimize their expenses. In this study, we study migration as a predictor of dropping out of compulsory education, in relation to other structural factors such as gender, poverty, and parental education. Particularly, we study the effects of social capital above and beyond social risk factors and investigate whether students’ access to social capital from school-based social resources reduce the risk of dropping out from compulsory schooling.
Data collection took place in six cities. Questionnaires were administered to both the child and his/her mother (N=764). Our findings suggest that the impact of structural risk factors such as child labor, illiterate mother and unstable employment of fathers are greater on migrant children. Rural to urban migration at school age (5-15 years) increases a child’s odds of dropping out from school about 103% compared to when the child is not migrated, above and beyond other significant structural risk factors like child labor, and no stable house income. The effect of migration on dropping out is significant for adolescents who migrated to Istanbul, but not to other less developed cities.Positive student-teacher relationship as a form of school social capital increased the odds of staying in school. We suggest that social capital factors are critical in the educational attainment and interventions should target immigrant children, families and the communities they live in.

Keywords:

Social capital, migration, social risk, education, Turkey.