Review of Regional Research - Virtual Special Issue - Education and Mobility
To celebrate the journal's 40 years anniversary, RRR will present a series of three virtual special issues from December 2020 to February 2021. Each virtual issue is dedicated to one of the journal's core topics, and covers a selection of previously published articles. The second virtual special issue is on "Education and Mobility", with a collection of four articles published in RRR since 2017.
Are they coming back? The mobility of university graduates in Switzerland (this opens in a new tab)
The present paper focus on the possible impact of university graduates’ internal mobility in Switzerland. This is an interesting setting because all the cantons have to bear the public costs for their students irrespective of the students’ study place of choice. As not all the cantons have a university, in some cantons students have to leave their home involuntarily to attend university. Focusing on the description of factors explaining internal graduate mobility, we investigate which of the cantons lose potential tax payers for which they had to bear the study costs and discuss the potential consequences on the financing of higher education. On average, half of the students who had left their place of living in order to study do not return to their home canton. Approximately half of those who do not return from the canton in which they studied move to a third canton. Besides other factors, which are linked to post-graduation mobility, we find that top-performing students return less often than low performers. As a consequence, the cantons without universities face a quantitative as well as a qualitative disadvantage compared to cantons with a university.
Chantal Oggenfuss, Stefan C. Wolter | RRR 2019
The price of mobility. How personality and preferences shape the mobility premium of university graduates (this opens in a new tab)
This paper addresses the question concerning the price of geographic mobility in various labour market and migration scenarios. Pivotal points are expected mobility premiums which are sufficient to tip the scales in favour of moving to a geographically distinct location. These premiums are first derived within a theoretical model, accounting not only for location-specific amenity levels or labour market conditions, but also for heterogeneous personality traits and preferences. Derived hypotheses demonstrate that—in presence of heterogeneous psychic costs or adjustment capabilities—expected mobility premiums can remain distinctly positive even in an unemployment scenario. Furthermore, adjustment capabilities are to a large extent related to earlier mobility experiences, implying that labour mobility is partially learnable.
Reinhard W. Weisser | RRR 2019
Motives behind the mobility of university graduates – A study of three German universities (this opens in a new tab)
The mobility of university graduates is influenced by economic factors and individual attitudes. The paper at hand focuses on the motives and studies the location preferences that university graduates have while they search for jobs (instead of a survey after graduation) and the reasons for these location preferences. To this end, prospective graduates from three universities in Hesse, Germany, have been surveyed in 2012. From this detailed data, we find that a majority has preferred locations during job search, but graduates with a strong focus on job opportunities are more often spatially open. Graduates focusing on social ties search dominantly at familiar places. Big cities attract especially graduates valuing job opportunities or amenities. As found previously in other studies, prior migration increase the propensity to move again after graduation. Overall, there is a large potential to retain graduates in the university region: most students include the university region into the spatial scope of their job search.
Sidonia von Proff, Matthias Duschl, Thomas Brenner | RRR 2017
Where do regional influences matter? The impact of socio-spatial indicators on transitions from secondary school to university (this opens in a new tab)
The paper at hand concentrates on how regional indicators influence school graduates’ transitions to university in and outside their home region. Our paper contributes to the literature in three ways: We include not only study opportunities in the region but focus on three distinct regional factors; namely, the economic situation, the university orientation as well as study opportunities. Furthermore, we quantify the spatial radius in which the three regional indicators affect individuals’ transition to university. Beyond that, the analyses cover a period of 26 years to infer on developments in the relevance of regional factors over time. To do so, geographic information on regions is used and aggregated within travel-time radii. The data is linked to panel data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Our findings indicate that, school graduates’ chances to enter university depend on labor-market conditions as well as on university infrastructure. We find that spatial radius matters; significant regional associations can only be observed up to radii of 60-minutes of travel time. Regional influences on the chance to enter university and the place of study increase over time.
Katarina Weßling, Nora Bechler | RRR 2019