While once considered damaging for impacted communities, out-migration has increasingly been recognized by scholars and policymakers as having both costs and benefits for locales migrants leave behind. A growing body of empirical work has examined this equation through exploring the effect out-migration has on educational opportunity in these sites. While some studies find positive effects on scholastic outcomes, others reveal negative associations. No previous research, however, has examined the underlying mechanisms behind these purported—and seemingly contradictory—shifts in educational outcomes.

My thesis contributes to this nascent literature by exploring the relationship between international remittance income—the hypothesized mechanism behind variability wrought by outmigration—and youth educational opportunity within one major Southern Mexican migrant sending community.

This dissertation is organized as three independent, but interrelated chapters. The first two chapters utilize a survey of the municipality's population of youths aged 15 to 19 and household heads with children to directly test the effects of remittances on a series of theoretically important educational outcomes. The third utilizes semi-structured interview and observational data collected in the community to discern the perceptions adolescent students, parents, teachers, and administrators have of the impact of this financial source on schooling.

In chapters one and two, I find through multivariate analysis that maternal education levels—and not remittance income—explain most of the variation in youth educational outcomes in the community; However, I find that when receiving remittances, youth—and their parents—with below average maternal education, have higher aspirations for the student's education than otherwise would be the case. Paradoxically, remittance income is associated with greater odds of upper secondary schooling completion in San Miguel Tlacotepec for youth with above average maternal education, a boost not shared by their less advantaged peers.

In the third paper, I find through qualitative data analysis that the impact of remittance income on youth educational performance and aspirations depends upon a complex interplay of individual, household, and community factors. I discover that the most academically successful and aspiring remittance receiving youth also receive a relatively high level of support on academic tasks from their mothers and frequent school-positive messages from absent family members. Local gender norms also emerge in my analysis as a dynamic that greatly influences the academic outlook and efforts of remittance receiving youth.