Investing in higher education is one of the most consequential decisions for lifetime earnings, yet educational opportunities vary across space, creating geographic inequalities in access. Educational migration can expand access by enabling students to pursue opportunities outside their hometown, making these choices central for policymakers seeking to promote economic mobility. I study educational migration in India using survey experiments and a randomized controlled trial examining whether peer networks can reduce migration barriers and encourage students to pursue educational migration opportunities. First, I document large perceived barriers to educational migration: students require, on average, more than a twofold increase in expected post-graduation income to migrate, and beliefs about non-monetary outcomes explain a substantial share of this migration aversion. Next, I implement a field experiment with prospective college students in Maharashtra that pairs high school students with educational migrants for mentoring sessions. The intervention targets high perceived costs of migration through destination-specific information and emotional support. Short term results indicate that exposure to migrant peers increases willingness to study both at home and in other destinations. It also raises the relative attractiveness of outside options by improving knowledge and perceived non-monetary returns.

This paper examines how restrictions on religious expression affect women's educational attainment. We study the 2010 removal of the headscarf ban in Turkish universities, which had long limited access to higher education for visibly religious women. Our empirical strategy combines cohort-level variation in exposure to the reform with individual-level variation in the propensity to veil within a difference-in-differences framework. We estimate veiling propensities using an early wave of the Turkish Demographic and Health Survey and predict them for a later sample using both machine learning and parametric methods. We show that lifting the ban significantly increased educational attainment among women with a higher propensity to veil. These gains appear to be concentrated around the transition into and progression through secondary school. The results remain similar when, instead of individual-level propensities, we use pre-reform veiling prevalence at the province level as an alternative exposure measure.

I study how migration distance affects higher education choices using administrative data from India's elite engineering universities, IITs. I document that students systematically trade off educational quality for geographic proximity when deciding where to attend university. Estimating a discrete model of college choice, I find the median student is willing to accept a program ranked 1.29 positions, 0.1 standard deviations, lower in their choice set to stay 100 kilometers closer to home. This trade-off varies substantially by gender: women exhibit stronger aversion to distance, sacrificing 70% more in educational quality to avoid migrating further compared to men. These findings reveal how spatial frictions create significant barriers to accessing high-quality education and exacerbate gender inequalities in human capital accumulation, even among high-achieving students at elite STEM institutions.

This project evaluates the effects of international educational migration, a novel approach to reducing global inequality by helping individuals from low-income countries to study and work in high-income countries. We partner with Malengo, an NGO that supports Ugandan students to pursue a Bachelor's degree in Germany. We conduct a randomized controlled trial, exploiting that Malengo randomizes admission among qualified applicants, and compare the outcomes of applicants who are selected by Malengo and those who are not, as well as their families and communities in Uganda. Here, we focus on short-term outcomes within the first three years of students' arrival in Germany, i.e. before they complete their degrees and enter the labor market. We measure the effects of the intervention on objective and subjective wellbeing, cognitive skills, and aspirations of applicants and their social networks in Uganda.

How does the opportunity of international educational migration affect human capital investments in the country of origin? We inform high school students in Uganda about a new merit-based study-abroad program and analyze how the experimentally induced changes in knowledge about the opportunity to study abroad shape their human capital investments. The Malengo program offers mentoring and financial support to young adults in Uganda who want to complete a university degree in Germany and could not otherwise afford to study at a university. Acceptance to the program combines the returns to higher education with the returns to migration and thus offers a life-changing opportunity. To be eligible, applicants must obtain a sufficiently high score in the high-stakes Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education examination. Our primary research question is whether and how educational migration prospects lead to increased human capital investments amongst students who eventually go abroad as well as those who remain in Uganda.

This project examines how international migration influences identity formation, particularly in shaping the perception of the self and others. We partner with an NGO that supports secondary school graduates from Uganda with limited financial means in pursuing a bachelor's degree in Germany. Admission to the program offers students a transformative opportunity to acquire higher education and increase their earnings. At the same time, students are exposed to a vastly different environment, characterized by distinct economic systems, political institutions, cultural norms, and racial compositions. We leverage the randomized admission among shortlisted applicants and conduct a randomized controlled trial. By tracking the outcomes of applicants and their families and friends in Uganda, we aim to uncover the direct effects of international migration on the perception of the self and others, as well as the spillover effects on those who remain in the country of origin. Our primary outcomes include universalism, gender attitudes, and racial identity.