Abstract
Refugees face significant barriers in the labor markets of western countries due to limited transferability of educational credentials. Post-migration education can increase refugees’ chances in the labor market, but little is known about the prevalence and underlying patterns of such post-secondary educational investments. I contribute to the literature by analyzing survey data from the Netherlands on post-migration education among more than 3,000 adult refugees who come from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, former Yugoslavia, and Somalia. I find that refugees’ investments in schooling depend on both pre- and post-migration characteristics. Results show that post-migration schooling is more common among adult refugees who are higher educated, who arrived at a younger age, who have applied for recognition of their foreign education, and who have (successfully) participated in integration and/or language courses. When refugees are kept in an asylum center for a longer time, they are less likely to invest in post-migration education.
Highlights
In the past decades, the size of the refugee population in Europe has increased considerably
I find that, among those who followed any schooling in the Netherlands (12/27 ) 56% received a diploma in the Netherlands
These results provide some evidence to suggest that refugees invest more in post-migration education than family and labor migrants
Summary
The size of the refugee population in Europe has increased considerably. In the literature on post-migration investments in education, scholars have mainly used the Immigrant Human Capital Investment (IHCI) model, developed by Duleep and Regets (1999), to derive hypotheses about post-migration investments in education (Van Tubergen and Van de Werfhorst, 2007; Banerjee and Verma, 2012; Adamuti-Trache et al, 2013; Calvo and Sarkisian, 2015; Adamuti-Trache, 2016; Damelang and Kosyakova, 2021). According to this model, the decision to invest in post-migration schooling depends on the costs and benefits of these investments. To organize the discussion of the hypotheses, I distinguish between the role of 1) pre-migration education, and 2) post-migration characteristics
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