“Brain Drain” or “Brain Gain”? Students’ Loyalty to their Student Town: Field Evidence from Norway

Abstract

In the global economy regions fight a two-front “war” to attract young people. On the one hand, they compete against more urban areas because young people leave home to study and do not return to their home region (“brain drain”). On the other hand, they struggle to attract new residents, students and entrepreneurs to their local region (“brain gain”). The context is a student town of a strong industrial region characterized by a net export of young people and an increasing demand for highly qualified labour. The purpose is to gain insight into how student loyalty to a student town may be enhanced. A partial least square path modelling approach is used to estimate a structural equation model of student town loyalty. One finding is that the creation of student town satisfaction has more influence on student town loyalty than reputation building. “Social activity” is the most important loyalty driver. This antecedent is mediated through student town satisfaction and reputation, as well as university college reputation. The town municipalities and the university college should thus be coordinated in their effort to increase student town loyalty to bring down the “brain drain” and increase the “brain gain” in the region.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

This summit was itself a follow-up to a summit at the Sorbonne in Paris in May 1998, where higher education ministers from France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany signed the Sorbonne Declaration on the “harmonisation of the architecture of the European Higher Education System” (EU, 2011a).

At their Leuven/Louvain-la-Neuve summit in April 2009 ministers reaffirmed their commitment to continue the Bologna Process and expressed the need to consolidate the reforms in the period towards 2020.

The ECTS makes teaching and learning in higher education more transparent across Europe and facilitates the recognition of all studies. The system allows for the transfer of learning experiences between different institutions, greater student mobility and more flexible routes to gain degrees. It also aids curriculum design and quality assurance (EU, 2011b).

There is a great deal of additional information about the Erasmus, Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci programmes on the Internet (e.g. British Council, 2011a, 2011b; ESN International, 2011; EU, 2011c).

In addition to the EU-based programmes, regional programmes have been established, for example, Nordplus for the Nordic countries (SIU, 2011). It is also quite common for bilateral agreements to be established between countries, especially when one of the countries is outside of Europe.

This abbreviation is taken from the Norwegian name of the organization (Nokut, 2011).

NOK is the abbreviation of “Norske kroner”, or the Norwegian currency.

It should be underscored that the figures here are based on statistics from the Statistics Norway and are not directly comparable with the OECD figures discussed above.

The Erasmus programme was established by EU in 1987. Norway has played an active part in the programme since 1992.