The Emigration and Employment of Irish Graduates

Abstract

During the late 1980s, emigration of university graduates from the Republic of Ireland rose to unprecedented levels. More than one-quarter of the graduates were living abroad nine months after graduation, according to statistics issued by the Higher Education Authority. After reviewing the changing socio-economic background to Irish emigration since the early 1950s, the second, and major, part of the article will present the findings of a large-scale empirical investigation of the employment and migration histories of a sample of 383 graduates who left Irish universities in the mid-1980s. This survey was carried out in 1990 and so recorded approximately five years of occupational and spatial mobility for each respondent. Although the survey results do back up popular impressions of an Irish brain drain, in many respects Irish high-skilled migration is merely a subset of total Irish migration since the graduates were found to rely on traditional family and ethnic networks in choosing their destination and often their employment. The destination countries of Irish graduate emigrants closely reflected the destinations of Irish emigrants as a whole, except that graduates showed a higher propensity to migrate to continental European countries. Moreover, a lot of to-and-fro movement was discovered, indicating that Irish graduates are highly mobile and responsive to opportunities at home and abroad. Finally the theoretical and policy implications of the research are evaluated. Conceptually the Irish brain drain can be contextualized within centre-periphery theory and the notion of Ireland having a truncated labour market: in other words, as a small-scale, geographically peripheral, unindustrialized and ex-colonial economy, Ireland cannot provide sufficient challenging jobs for its graduate population, which is itself increasing. Policy-wise, educating young people for export may be hard to justify, particularly when this investment in human capital is exported to richer countries like the United States, Britain and Germany.