Mexican Transnational Students’ Thinking About Higher Education: Implications for Practice and Policy

• In Event: Transnationalism, Immigrants, and Schooling: Perspectives on College Pathways

Abstract

As the latest phase of a 10-year research project examining students in Mexican schools with prior experience in the U.S., our binational team is, for the first time, using a census to count the number of such students in a Mexican state, in this case the small state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City. Using a census, we found 781 transnational students enrolled in Morelos primarias and secundarias (i.e., elementary and middle schools). These students are asked a battery of questions about their migration and educational experiences, but this time we have also collected comparative information on aspirations for high school and college. In short, our purpose is to consider how experience in two nations' school systems, or as a related issue, the fact of having U.S. citizenship because of place of birth, affects how students describe or imagine their futures in high school and college. Our study is comparative not only because we can compare transnational to mononational students (mononational meaning those who have only lived and gone to school in Mexico), but also because we can compare different profiles of transnational students to each other. Thirty-two percent of our sample had spent more than 4 years in U.S. schools while 47% had just a year there. Does this matter for students' plans to continue beyond the compulsory years of schooling? Several theoretical models inform or study (including sociological theories, like 'transnationalism from below' [Smith and Guarnizo, 1994], that are more helpful for the larger research project than this particular paper). For this paper, two core theoretical premises matter: first that aspiring to higher education or imagining oneself at that tier is positively correlated with continuing on to such levels and second that factors related to school experiences in either or both countries, to countr(ies) of citizenship, and/or context of (return) migration may matter for whether a student aspires to continue his/her schooling beyond the compulsory number of years. Our data were collected through written questionnaires, although observations and interviews with teachers and students at several of the schools with highest transnational student enrollments complement this core data. Students enrolled at the time of 2010, 2011, and 2012 censuses were our primary data sources. As of this writing, results and analysis are preliminary, but they do clearly show a bifurcation in the transnational student population—i.e., more with higher aspirations than their mononational Mexican peers, but also more at the low end of the distribution (who seem less likely to advance further with their schooling. Also, not surprisingly, far more transnational students imagine educational futures that include advanced study in the U.S. (although their higher education aspirations are not just directed towards the U.S.). This work is significant for several reasons consistent with the conference theme of illustrating the relevance of educational research to policy and practice. As higher education becomes increasingly important for income security and professional success, it behooves both U.S. and Mexican universities to anticipate transnational students as prospective enrollees.

Authors

• Edmund T. Hamann, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Juan Sanchez Garcia, Normal School, Miguel F. Martinez