Competition for talent: retaining graduates in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine

ABSTRACT

Graduates are considered a convenient source of human capital in today’s knowledge-based economy. It is therefore crucial to understand what drives their mobility intentions to retain larger numbers of graduates. This is particularly true for peripheral regions, which need to compete with economic centres that are assumed to be more attractive. This paper adds a euregional perspective to the existing literature on graduate migration by investigating whether or not students intend to stay in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine (EMR) after graduation. It takes into account the role of hard and soft locational factors, social factors as well as individual characteristics in shaping future graduates’ mobility preferences. Using survey data from 2015 from five higher education institutions in the EMR, this paper finds that mobility intentions are determined by students’ perceptions of the quality of life, openness and career opportunities in the euroregion. In addition, distance to the partner and other social ties such as family and friends influence migration intentions.

KEYWORDS:

• Euroregion
• prospective graduates
• highly skilled migration
• human capital
• talent

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referee and Frank Cörvers for the constructive feedback and comments. In addition, the authors would like to thank RWTH Aachen, FH Aachen, Universiteit Hasselt, Maastricht University and Zuyd University of Applied Science for supporting the implementation of our survey by inviting their students to participate.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The survey was carried out by Maastricht University in cooperation with the five institutes of higher education. Students were approached through their student email account.

2 We tested the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives assumption (IIA) of the multinomial logit model applying a Hausman-McFadden test. We run the full model including all three outcomes (leave/stay/uncertain) against the restricted model in which we exclude the group of respondents indicating to be uncertain whether to move or not. The results of the test show that the full model is the correct specification (Cameron & Trivedi, 2009).

3 Adding an interaction variable between the importance attached to the quality of life and the view on the quality of life in the EMR confirm these findings.

4 There is one exception: While in general respondents who were born in the EMR are more likely to be uncertain about their future residency, the variable loses its statistical significance when adding social factors in Model 5.

Additional information

Funding

The implementation of the survey, on which this project is based, was supported by the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market – Maastricht University.