The rural-urban migration is a key factor in shaping the development of China’s great growth. Recently China has been facing the slowing down of growth of labor force from rural areas, so how to promote the labor rural-urban migration is a new challenge for China. This paper discusses the external effect of rural local education on the migration of rural labors and its mechanisms, and uses the local average education as the proxy of the external effect of education. In fact, we think that the external effect of rural local education has two opposite directions on the rural-urban migration. On the one hand, entrepreneurship is more active in regions with higher education. It implies that the community-level education can promote the development of local business, which will increase the availability of local non-agricultural jobs. Therefore, the local effects of education on the rural-urban migration could be negative, especially in regions with vigorous local business. On the other hand, individuals with higher education in a network usually have more resources, such as higher incomes to provide temporary accommodations and lending or higher abilities of collecting job information. Therefore, we can expect a positive effect of average education on the migration for regions with stronger local migrant networks. With the data from the China Household Income Project Survey (CHIP2002 & CHIP2013), the empirical findings support our hypothesis. We find that the local education endowment indeed has two opposite roles in the migration. First, the increase of local education endowment can promote the development of local enterprises, which will hinder the rural-urban migration. However, the increase of local education can strengthen the positive effect of the migrant’s networks on the migration, so the aggregate effect of local community education on the migration will depend on the development of local development of enterprises and the migrant’s networks. Finally, our results are robust with the support of the instrumental variable method. The policy implications are apparent. For areas with potential to develop the local non-farm economy, local governments should import more investment by strengthening local education; while for other rural areas, cultivating local migrant social networks can enhance the role of local education in promoting the migration.