Regional Differences in Higher Educational Choice?

ABSTRACT

This paper examines geographical differences in choice of field in higher education. Formerly, educational attainment differed considerably between rural areas and urban centres. Today these differences are pretty much offset. What kind of education students from different geographical areas pursue is however less well known. This article examines this question. It analyses data from public administrative registers on the entire Norwegian population born between 1955 and 1983. It finds that people who have grown up close to a university more often study at a university, whereas people who have grown up near a university college more often study at a university college. Corresponding differences are found in the choice of educational field.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational choice
• regional differences
• higher education
• educational fields
• institutional decentralisation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Norway is the sixth biggest country in Europe by area (km²) and the twenty-eighth biggest by population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_population and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_area, accessed 30 March 2015).

2 The specialised universities are institutions at university level offering education only in certain areas such as architecture, music, or business administration.

3 Regrettably, our data do not include information about upper secondary GPA. We do not think, however, that this is an insurmountable problem. Grades are not correlated with municipality degree of urbanisation, and our control for social background factors (i.e., mothers’ and fathers’ education and parents’ income) takes care of some of the potential problems (because these background characteristics are highly correlated with grades).

4 We include the two categories at the MA level because students in elite professional education do not need to complete a BA degree, but follow unitary programs (e.g., in law or medicine) lasting 6 years. The remainder category “Other MA degrees” is singled out from degree holders in the same subjects at the BA level because university colleges normally offer degrees only at the BA level, whereas universities offer degrees at both levels.

5 http://www.ssb.no/en/klass/#!/klassifikasjoner/128/om (accessed 28 September 2012).

6 Issues regarding estimation have been raised in treatments of non-linear models such as ours (Allison, 1999). These issues concern the so-called scaling problems in residuals of the outcome variables. One way to tackle this issue is to compare results with the average marginal effects or simple cross-tabulations. We have done both (not shown), and neither deviate from standard estimated marginal effects, which may suggest that the scaling problem is not a big issue here.

7 Because institution is not registered in the data before 1995.