From school to university to work: migration of highly educated youths in China

A burgeoning body of the literature has studied the migration of university-bound students and university graduates in developed countries, but little research has been conducted on this issue in China. Using microdata from the 2005 1 % population sample survey, this paper examines, for the first time, the migration of university entrants and graduates in China by describing their migration patterns and modeling their choices of destination location. The migration patterns show that recent university graduates are highly concentrated in three eastern provincial units, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, and that the destinations of university entrants tend to be more dispersed geographically. The results from conditional logit models indicate that highly educated youths, in particular those who study in a regular university, have a strong tendency to stay in the same province after graduation. The migration of university entrants is determined mainly by regional differences in university enrollment, while the distribution of national key universities, economic opportunities, and the cost of living plays a less important role in their location choices. The migration of university graduates is driven primarily by regional differences in wage levels. Comparing with vocational college entrants, regular university entrants are attracted to regions with more national key universities. Comparing with vocational college graduates, regular university graduates are attracted to regions with higher wage levels. Our findings suggest that increasing labor market returns is a more effective approach than investing in higher education to curb brain drain in China’s less developed regions.