Human Capital Redistribution in the USA: The Migration of the College-bound

Public universities and human capital development in the United States

Public colleges and universities play an important role in the formation of human capital through the attraction, training, and often local-regional retention of students. Much of the existing research on the subject examines one stage in this process, one type of institution, and/or one type of regional environment. While such studies can generate important insights, taking too narrow a perspective on one or more of these elements can lead to distortions about the impact of institutions of higher learning on the regions they serve. This paper adds to the literature by (1) widening the temporal frame of analysis to include the student's journey from hometown to campus and then to additional locations 10 years after graduation, and (2) by deepening the cross-sectional view of a region's layered institutions to include the many different types of public higher education and the variety of human capital they support. Data from 64 institutions spread across 10 labor market regions under the State University of New York show how institution type corresponds to (1) the geography of populations served, (2) the nature of skills and training supplied, and (3) local/regional retention a decade later. The empirical study also identifies the extent to which factors such as regional variation, degree level, and students' program of study associate with human capital development (e.g., wages, retention) and therefore contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the broader relationship between institutions of higher learning and local/regional human capital formation.

The Impact of Place of Origin on International and Domestic Graduates’ Mobility in China

This article addresses the cumulative effect of graduate migration and opportunities for career development. Using data from an online survey of 756 master’s-level graduates educated in China and the UK, it examines their geographical mobility patterns and reveals significant differences between Chinese students who graduated from domestic universities and those who were educated abroad. Spatial autocorrelation analysis shows that international returnees, who usually had more privileged family backgrounds, clustered in China’s highly developed core cities of the Bohai Economic Rim and Yangtze River Delta regions, such as Beijing and Shanghai, while domestic graduates tended to work and live in less affluent medium-sized cities around these regions. Women international graduates were more mobile than their men counterparts. Our results provide new evidence that draws attention to migration’s role in graduate career development opportunities and highlights inherent economic discrimination within China, which is perpetuated by the national residency permit system — Hukou. The case of Chinese graduates shows that the mobility patterns of international and domestic graduates are influenced by and contribute to growing regional inequalities for career development in China.

Where science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates move: Human capital, employment patterns, and interstate migration in the United States

This research investigates the interstate migration of workers in the United States who have earned an undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degree compared with those who have not. We build on previous studies that (a) classified "skilled" workers as having earned an undergraduate degree (b) used net migration gain or loss as a yardstick of relative destination attraction, and (c) advanced the idea that physical amenities play an outsized role in labour market preferences for skilled workers. We calibrate the attractivity of states for three levels of human capital and then evaluate these assessments of relative attractivity to show that workers with different types of human capital respond to different labour market signals in contradictory ways. Amenity, measured by heating degree days, has little to do with the state-to-state migration of workers who have a STEM degree, yet helps explain the migration patterns of workers with no undergraduate degree. Employment growth in a state influences migration for degreed workers in the recessionary years but not in the period of recovery. The opposite holds for workers without a degree. States with high percentages of any type of degreed workers attract both STEM and non-STEM degreed migrants but not those without a degree. States with a large share of STEM degreed workers in their degreed workforce are especially attractive for STEM degreed migrants. The conclusions discuss what the findings imply about diverging access to labour market opportunity by human capital and state higher education policy.