Understanding the emigration propensity of Romanian teachers: Does ethnicity play a role?

Abstract

Mass migration was, is, and will always be an important topic of discussion regardless of whether it is economically, socially, or politically motivated. This is certainly a matter of great concern for Romania, currently Europe’s largest sender of migrants to Western Europe. Considering that the educational system should be of the uttermost priority, we addressed the issue of emigration propensity among Romanian teachers making use of data from our own nationwide survey. Bivariate logistic models were employed to identify the main factors behind the emigration decisions of pre-university teachers. Aiming to enrich the narrow economic perspective, we adopted a novelty approach by focusing on an overlooked determinant in emigration research studies, namely ethnicity in relation to nationality. Among Romania’s minorities, Hungarians are the most important ethnic group, accounting for 6.1% of the population, hence we explored their migration behaviour compared to Romanian ethnics. The results from the logistic regression models indicate significant differences regarding the factors that trigger the intention to initiate the emigration process for our subjects, based on their ethnicity. We found that teachers of Hungarian ethnicity display 50.6% less propensity to emigrate compared to the ones of Romanian ethnicity and we were able to shape distinct emigration profiles for the two groups.