Accessibility to Higher Education and Inter-regional Mobility

Se-il Mun, Shun Fujita and Lei Qin

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Abstract: We develop an equilibrium model of the undergraduate higher education market that incorporates interregional mobility for enrollment. An individual chooses a college to attend, seeking to maximize utility depending on the quality of education and the costs of attendance. Costs include tuition fees, the effort required to pass the entrance exam, and moving costs from one's hometown to the region where the college is located. Each college admits students whose entrance exam scores exceed a certain threshold, which we call the college's qualifying score. In our model, the qualifying score of each college is determined endogenously as the shadow price of the constraint that the number of enrolled students must not exceed capacity. We structurally estimate the model's parameters by simulating equilibrium using Japanese data. Based on empirical results and counterfactual experiments, we evaluate the welfare costs of disparities in access to higher education due to uneven spatial distribution of colleges among regions.

Date: 2026-10
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