Introduction
Rural youth, as one of the most important human resources, constitutes a large part of the population and workforce of the rural community and play a valuable role in improving the economic and social situation of rural families. This is a capable resource to transform villages from unfavorable situation to favorable situation. Over the past few decades, migration has led to an aging rural population. Because most of the immigrants are young people, and often, they are the ones who tend to leave the villages to stay in the cities. Both migration and increasing age of the villagers become the main concern in rural areas. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the situation and adopt scientific and executive strategies to manage it. In this paper, we study the migration motivation of rural students in field of agriculture at Zanjan University.
Methodology
This research is an applied study which uses a survey in data collection and a correlation for analysis. In the present study, the factors affecting the migration motivation of rural youth were identified through a literature review and a research questionnaire was applied to find the correlation for the factors. The population of this study consisted of rural students studying in the fields of agriculture at University of Zanjan in 2018-2019 (N=210). The sample size was determined using the Krejcie & Morgan table (n=132). We used a stratified random sampling method to select the students for this study. Finally, the data were analyzed with SPSS software version 24.
Discussion and conclusion
The migration of educated youth from rural to urban areas is an alarming phenomenon in the geographical space of the country. The reason is that the situation can reduce the ability and motivation of the agricultural labor force in rural areas and lead to the waste of human capital in the country. Given that any planning in rural areas is directly and indirectly related to population structure and quality, it was important to study the factors affecting the willingness of moving out in rural youth.
The results showed that the number of family members living in the city, the desire to live in the village, life satisfaction, the amount of participation in agricultural activities, irrigated land owned by the family, accommodations and economic amenities in the urban areas and employment problem and difficulty of establishing business in the rural area are the most important reasons for the migration of agriculturally educated rural toung people.
Based on the results of logistic regression, the difficulty of establishing business in the rural area had the greatest impact on the inclination of migration. This finding reflects the fact that the most important priority of rural agricultural students is to achieve a job and create a business. Thus, it is suggested that the problem needs to be solved by promising an employment package for the agriculturally educated rural youth. These packages consist of the cases of financing through the allocation of low-income employment loans with minimum bureaucracy, consulting and training to start the businesses required by the market and marketing and sales program. Also, based on the results of regression analysis, it was found that the two variables of life satisfaction and the amount of participation in agricultural activities had a positive effect on migration tendency. This indicates that the more satisfied young people are with their lives, the greater their desire to migrate. This finding, along with increasing the tendency to migrate by increasing the participation of the rural youth in agricultural activities, indicates the fact that the desire to migrate among young people is not due to ignorance and lack of knowledge but is based on the existing knowledge and realities of rural society. As students' experience and knowledge of the agricultural situation increase, they come to the unfortunate conclusion that migration is a better way to achieve their goals. Using exploratory factor analysis, strategies to strengthen the rural economy by increasing the desire of rural youth to live and work in rural areas after graduation were summarized in two factors including facilitating the market of products and employment in rural areas and developing public and private investment in rural areas and agriculture.
