Does graduate education abroad matter? Evidence from Burkina Faso

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses international student migration, return migration and labor market entry by examining the effects of graduate educational migration on employment, type of employment, wage and wait time to obtain employment. Using primary data collected in 2021 on 1774 burkinabè graduates, including non-migrants and migrants (returnees and non-returnees), the results are mixed. Migration for studies does not provide better access to employment for returnees because they take longer to get a job despite having degrees from schools abroad and earning more. Controlling for selection bias, Ph.D. graduates take longer to find jobs than do Master's graduates. Arbitrating between unemployment and a lower-skilled job, the findings highlight that the returnees prefer unemployment. Assignment and queuing theories are supported for returnees.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• wage
• labor market
• migration
• sequential modeling
• Heckman selection

JEL:

• Codes: J0
• I2
• R1

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers for taking the time and effort necessary to review the manuscript. We sincerely appreciate all your valuable comments and suggestions, which helped in improving the manuscript. We are grateful to Daniel Bruce Sarpong for the feedback about the manuscript. We would like to acknowledge the editors for considering our work. Any errors are the author’s responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 http://data.uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx?queryid=172

2 https://migrationdataportal.org/data

3 UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2020).