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Paper short abstract

The paper shows that remittances and the resulting access to asset and loan produce unequal education migration pathways and moral expectations of return, shaping access to destinations, institutions, and careers, while binding families across generations through obligations of care and repayment.

Paper long abstract

Transnational education migration has emerged as a significant phenomenon in Nepal as reflected in the growing migration of students, especially to Australia and North America. In contemporary Nepal, ideas of both migration and education are deeply embedded in narratives of modernization and promises of social mobility. Within this context, this paper examine how international education migration is produced and understood as a moral and intergenerational investment and how unequal remittance flows produce differential educational migration pathways. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between September and December 2025 comprising semi-structured interviews with young adults and their parents in Damak, Nepal.

Situated at the intersection of internal migration, labour migration, and rapidly expanding education-migration infrastructures, Damak has become key site where families mobilise remittances, assets, and debt to finance their children’s education abroad. All young adults in this study come from households where at least one parent has previously migrated for work or is working abroad, situating education migration within longer intergenerational histories of mobility. The paper shows that unequal nature of remittance flows and resulting differential access to assets and loans produces polarised educational migration pathways shaping access to destinations, institutions and career trajectories. Likewise, remittances function not only as financial resources but as moral claims that generate expectations of return from young adults through care and responsibility toward their parents and siblings. As such, the paper contributes to debates in educational anthropology and migration studies by showing how education migration interacts with remittance and debt as economic and moral investment.