The gainers and losers from the United Kingdom's university‐related migration: A subregional analysis of Graduate Outcomes Survey data

Abstract

Against the background of the rise in higher‐education participation rates, this paper examines the spatial redistribution of undergraduates across the United Kingdom resulting from moves to and from university. Drawing on the Graduate Outcomes Surveys of 2017/2018 and 2018/2019, address data coded to 53 subregions (SRs) are used to track those enrolled on degree courses by age 20 from domicile to university and workplace 15 months after graduation. The paper begins by examining how university‐ward migration serves to concentrate this group geographically and the way in which subsequent job‐related moves tend to reinforce this process. Each person is then classified on the basis of their migration trajectories between domicile and workplace, enabling a set of migration accounts to be produced for each SR. Applying cluster analysis to these accounts, a six‐way grouping of SRs is used to gauge change between their domicile and workplace populations in both overall numbers and qualitative characteristics, the latter being measured in terms of educational qualifications preuniversity and occupational status 15 months after graduation. These analyses demonstrate how the different types of SRs fare in these exchanges of students/graduates, with more subregions suffering the ‘double whammy’ of losing out in both quantitative and qualitative terms than gaining from this process, with challenging implications for central government's current ‘levelling‐up’ agenda.