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Family-related migration represents a major entry channel for newcomers to Europe. Nevertheless, European studies have neglected many key aspects of family-related migration, lagging behind developments in North American and Latin American research. By employing the 2008 ad-hoc module on international migration from the European Union Labor Force survey, this paper aims to address that oversight. We adopt a gender perspective and concentrate on the role of higher education in shaping partner migration. We show that higher education inhibits women’s couple-related migration, where women follow a male first mover. In contrast, we find no relationship between men’s higher education and couple-related migration, where men follow a female first mover. We suggest that male migrants reunify (or choose to form a couple) with a lower educated female partner who still lives in the country of origin to preserve traditional gender relations, especially among older male migrants, while the same reasoning does not apply to women’s first movers.

Family Migration, Higher Education, Europe