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

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.