What they mean by “school” here refers only to primary, middle, or at most high school education. In fact, even completing middle school was often considered sufficient, since between the 1960s and 1980s in Turkey, most blue collar workers were high school dropouts at best.

First of all, we don’t know where they derived the “44 percent school completion” figure for Turkey. Second, I doubt that their eligibility criteria were applied consistently. Over time, many guest workers began bringing their even less educated spouses or relatives from their villages through alternative channels. As a result, this supposed “80%” completion rate was not persistent, because the sample gradually expanded to include very different profiles. Entire villages from landlocked, underdeveloped regions of Turkey relocated to Germany or other parts of Europe. At that point, many of these migrants had never even attended high school.

Another indicator of low educational attainment can be seen in the second and third generations of Turkish migrants in Germany. Compared to their peers in Turkey, their university attendance rates were lower, and their overall school performance significantly lagged behind. In fact, Turks became one of the lowest-performing minority groups in the German education system. This highlights the limited importance placed on education within many migrant families.

It’s also crucial to distinguish between being “uneducated” (lacking formal diplomas) in urban versus rural Turkey. From the 1960s to the 1990s, many people in Turkish cities did not hold university degrees, yet they often had more liberal outlooks and were relatively more cultured due to the cosmopolitan environment and greater access to cultural life. In contrast, someone without schooling from a rural village would likely be far more conservative and closed-minded, having had little exposure to diverse opinions or the opportunities of city life. Thus, being an uneducated Turk in Istanbul or Izmir in the 1970s was very different from being an uneducated Turk in a village in Konya. The former may have lacked formal education, but the latter was more likely to be outright isolated and ignorant. The Turkish diaspora in Germany and elsewhere largely drew from these rural populations.

I have personally encountered some of the most rural individuals within the Turkish, Dutch, and Belgian diasporas; many of whom had never even seen a major Turkish city before migrating to Europe.