Abstract

The uneven territorial and population development of the educational infrastructure and the labor market, the differentiation of educational aspirations and resource capabilities of different social groups, the possibility of enrolment to educational organizations in different regions of Russia based on the examination results explain the relevance of researching the scale, motives, directions and restrictions of educational migration of the Russian school graduates. It is important to find out what groups of modern youth and their families develop the attitudes towards educational migration, what resources are required to implement these attitudes, which directions of actual and potential educational migration in the context of regions and types of settlements there are. Revealing stable routes of educational migration of the Russian youth is an urgent research problem. The main goal of this work is to determine the directions and factors of the planned educational migration of the 9th and 11th grade schoolchildren for receiving secondary vocational and higher education, on the basis of sociological data. The objectives of the study are, in particular, to identify the grounds for demand by households with schoolchildren in graduation grades to receive secondary vocational and higher education outside the settlement or region of current residence; identification of the motives for obtaining education outside the settlement or region of current residence; analysis of the educational trajectories of schoolchildren in graduation grades involving educational migration. The methodology of sociological research involves the use of a combined quantitative and qualitative toolkit, carried out using specially developed field documents. The main findings of the study are as follows: it was discovered that the parents are divided into two groups of comparable size – those inclined towards educational migration (56%) and those planning to receive vocational education in the settlement of residence; the composition of these groups varied significantly depending on the settlement types and educational aspirations; to a large extent, when planning to receive secondary vocational education and higher education, the younger generation repeats the educational trajectory of their parents, reproducing the family status. The research results can be used in the interests of public education authorities to assess the consequences of educational migration for the socio-economic development of the regions of the Russian Federation.