Highly qualified rural youth: why do young graduates return to their home region?

Abstract

This paper addresses the motivations underlying migration decision-making in the case of young university graduates returning to their rural home region in Switzerland. Empirical results show the joint role of social ties, living environment, and job opportunities, although the weight given to each of these factors varies between graduates. Some strategies used by the graduates to cope with a limited labour market are furthermore identified. I argue that internal migrations are far from being the sole consequence of labour market conditions and that a greater appreciation of non-economic issues is needed.

Keywords:

• internal migration
• return migration
• brain drain
• youth
• highly skilled migrants

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the institutions that funded the research project: the Anne & Robert Bloch Foundation, the Canton of Jura and the University of Neuchâtel.

Notes

1. It is important to note that what is meant by peripheral and rural is highly context-dependent and varies greatly between countries.

2. University graduates represent a limited – but rising – proportion of young adults (about 15%), as the Swiss education system also places importance on other forms of education, such as apprenticeships and professional training.

3. The remaining 426, which are not addressed in this paper, were graduates of further education in applied science (vocational training) and graduates due to participate in further full-time education.

4. The question asked was ‘What was the importance of the following elements in your decision to stay or to come back in Canton Jura?’ Interviewees could choose a response from a five-point Likert scale (‘not important at all’, ‘not very important’, ‘moderately important’, ‘important’, and ‘very important’).

5. The importance of social ties is also shown by other factors, such as the desire to re-join one's partner, the local culture (particularly people's values and way of life), and the clubs and societies of which graduates are members.

6. These items were on the list in order to establish a comparison with the motivations of young graduates who have not returned. In the case of graduates deciding not to return, fiscal reasons were the factor with the weakest importance, although Jura is one of the cantons with the highest taxes.

7. The PCA was conducted with SPSS on the 13 items (the Likert scale was considered as a continuous scale) with orthogonal rotation (varimax). The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) measure verified the sampling adequacy for the analysis, KMO = .79, and all KMO values for individual items were above the acceptable limit of .5 (Field 2009). Bartlett's test of sphericity X²(78) = 883.85, p < .001, indicated that correlations between items were sufficiently large for PCA. An initial analysis was run to obtain eigenvalues for each component in the data; four components had eigenvalues over Kaiser's criterion of 1, and these components combined explained 67.3% of the variance.

8. Of the 67 graduates for whom this was the case, 37 (55.2%) live in Canton Jura and 30 (44.8%) elsewhere (p < .1).

9. In Switzerland, to become a teacher requires a university degree, and then a two-year course in a teacher training college. This decision is thus made after the bachelor degree or, more often, after the master's degree.

10. Location quotients characterise the employment structure of graduates in Jura in regard to the rest of Switzerland by comparing the share they represent. If a quotient is equal to 1, the share of the given sector is similar in both cases. A quotient of 1.1 (resp. 0.9) would mean that the proportion was 10% higher (resp. lower) in Jura than elsewhere.