The move from the country to the city starts early in the morning. The experience of Andreea Pascu from Iași in Romania is just one example. Andreea travels to Iași everyday for school and lives 45 minutes away from the city. When she began going to secondary school there, she was shocked to find out that some of her classmates live only five minutes away from the school. For her this is the “only option” as her village only has a primary school. Some of her classmates live in school dorms and miss their homes so Andreea considers herself lucky. She says that “there is no other way to go to high school or uni if not in the city”.
This is a common issue across Europe. On the other side of the continent, in Ireland, young people expressed similar concerns. The National Rural Youth Assembly convened in November 2024 and made 12 recommendations to the Irish government. Two of these recommendations stated that there should be increased funding for rural schools to allow them to offer more subjects and that hybrid classes should be made available to facilitate young people who live far away from schools to come together and support each other. Young people from across Europe are moving for school but solutions are available to support them to be educated locally too.
For some young people, the only way to access university is by moving to a city. Alexandra Teixeira experienced this when she moved from Santiago do Cáncem to Lisbon so she could study politics. Her town only offered education up to high school and the nearest university was an hour away. She wanted to go to a good university and in her own words “the best ones in my field of study are in Lisbon”. Alexandra felt “trapped” in her hometown and wanted to change her environment. Moving to Lisbon gave her more opportunities like learning how to debate. Yet, in Lisbon she finds herself missing home. She says that she doesn’t want to live in her hometown but it will always be nostalgic for her. “That place taught me how to live and love”.
Alexandra is just one example of a young person having to leave their home to pursue higher education. A Eurostudent report noted that the “need to live with their parents limits students’choice of HEI (Higher Education Institutions) to those that are within reach of the parental homes’, Alexandra would not have been able to study in her chosen field by staying in her hometown. The cost of moving away for university is a major barrier here too.
Just because young people want to go to university or pursue a career, it doesn’t mean they always want to leave their rural home. I personally love living in the countryside. I love seeing the iconic Irish green fields every day and there’s a kind of peace you get in the countryside that you just can’t find anywhere else. When the European Youth Card Association put together its Rural Youth Report in 2024, they asked young people to come up with ideas on how to improve their local communities. These ideas, like enhanced public transport and access to housing, prove that young people do often want to stay in their rural areas. They see opportunities to create a community where they can live, work and study.
One example of a young person who had to leave a rural area for education but did not want to is Louis Leveugle, from West Flanders in Belgium. Louis has moved to an urban environment for university. He didn’t want to move from his rural area because Belgium is densely populated. In his own words, “I see no point in moving to a city when you could just live peacefully in a rural area”.
