Return Migration of Foreign Students.

Govert E Bijwaard,Qi Wang

doi:10.1007/s10680-015-9360-2

Abstract

Using administrative panel data, this paper presents a comprehensive empirical analysis of the return of recent foreign students in the Netherlands. We focus on how individual labour market changes and marriage formation influence their decision to leave. Our model allows for correlated unobserved heterogeneity across the migration, the labour market and the marriage formation processes. The large size of the data permits us to stratify the analysis by five groups based on the country of birth. The empirical analyses reveal that when students become unemployed they leave faster. The effect of finding a job on return is more ambiguous. For students from developed (including EU) countries it hardly affects their return, while students from less developed countries and Antilles/Surinam are more prone to leave after finding a job. Marriage in the Netherlands makes the students more prone to stay.

Highlights

Among the growing migration population the number of foreign students has increased most rapidly
This implies that any observed relationship between individual labour market changes or marriage formation and return migration may be caused by unobserved factors that influence both the labour market dynamics, the marriage formation and the return migration decision
Before we turn to the discussion of our main results, the impact of labour market and marriage formation processes on the migration hazard, we briefly discuss the impact of included control variables on the return hazard

Summary

Introduction

Among the growing migration population the number of foreign students has increased most rapidly. With the increasing internationalisation of educational programs, students start seeking more and more educational opportunities outside. The number of foreign tertiary students in OECD countries has grown 7 % annually from 2000 to 2011 and has reached 4.3 million in 2011. In the Netherlands the number of foreign students has more than doubled from 2000 to 2011. About 9 % of all students at Dutch higher education have a foreign nationality. The inflow of foreign student constitutes about 16 % of the recent total inflow of foreigners into the Netherlands (Bijwaard 2010)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion