Education as early stage brokerage: Cooling out asspiring migrants for the global hotel industry

• Main Author: ORTIGA, Yasmin Y.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Labour migration; Brokers; Migration infrastructure; Higher education; Service work; Philippines; Sociology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2753
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Through an analysis of the field of hotel and restaurant management,a program popular among Filipino youth hoping to find work overseas,this paper argues that an integral, yet invisible, aspect of educating futuremigrant workers is “cooling out” working-class students for a hospitalityindustry that runs on low-wage, contractual labour. This practice of coolingout involves reorienting students’ ambitions towards blue-collar jobs thatdo not require college degrees, encouraging them to start from the bottomin pursuing their migration dreams. Based on qualitative interviews with36 college educators and 25 students, this paper discusses how the cooling-out function serves as a form of migration brokerage, funnelling aspiringmigrants into lower segments of the global labour market even before theyleave their countries of origin. Yet, students do not question such practices,constructing a notion of working-class values that allows them to take pridein performing work that others might consider undesirable. This paperemphasizes the need for migration scholars to look beyond schooling asa stepping stone towards social mobility and unpack the role of highereducation as part of a migration infrastructure that conditions aspiringmigrants’ mobility