Are they coming back? The mobility of university graduates in switzerland

Kehren sie Zurück? Die Mobilität von Hochschulabsolventinnen und -Absolventen in der Schweiz

Chantal Oggenfuss () and Stefan Wolter
Additional contact information
Chantal Oggenfuss: Swiss Coordination Centre for Research in Education

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, 2019, vol. 39, issue 2, No 5, 189-208

Abstract: Abstract 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.

Keywords: Student mobility; Graduate mobility; Brain gain; Brain drain; H52; H75; I23; J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10037-019-00132-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jahrfr:v:39:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s10037-019-00132-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10037

DOI: 10.1007/s10037-019-00132-4

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft is currently edited by Thomas Brenner and Georg Hirte

More articles in Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft from Springer, Gesellschaft für Regionalforschung (GfR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().