Mobility: Why do University Students Move?

In 1999 approximately 11 per cent of students under 20 years old who enrolled at Australian universities moved to undertake study. In this paper we try to establish why these students moved. Is it simply because there is no university nearby or are there other reasons? This question goes to the importance of geographic access to a university and whether access drives higher education decisions. It also goes to the question of whether providing more campuses in regional Australia would entice more of the region’s students to remain at home.

Even a cursory examination of the pattern of movement of young students entering university in 1999 indicates that factors other than access are likely to be important. In that year over 63,200 students, who were 19 years of age or less, enrolled at Australian universities. As Table 1 indicates 7,100 students changed their location to attend university. However, only about 2,600 of these students did not have a university within 50km of their home and just under half of all movers had a university within 25 kilometres of their home.

Table 1        Students who moved - distance to nearest university for students prior to moving

This study will disentangle the factors that influence the decision to stay in a region or to move to attend university. The factors included in the study are: geographic access to institutions, academic ability of the student, socio-economic status of the home region as well as personal characteristics of the student.

Overall the findings of this study suggest that access to institutions is important but other factors are more important. In particular subject choice and academic ability, as measured by the student’s University Admissions Index (UAI), are more important than access in the student’s decision to move to undertake study.

For both metropolitan students and non-metropolitan based students subject choice is a very significant factor in the decision whether or not to move. The analysis suggests that students move to study subjects, such as medicine and dentistry, that are offered at relatively few campuses. They also move to campuses that have recognised expertise in particular subjects. For non-metropolitan students a further factor is the concentration of subjects in metropolitan campuses. For example, well over 90 per cent of commencing places in economics in 1999 were in city campuses. Overall it would appear that the decision to move is not so much about access but about access to particular courses.

The impact of high UAI scores is the same for both the metropolitan and non-metropolitan student populations in that high scores are associated with a higher than average probability of moving. At the lower end of the distribution, however, metropolitan and non-metropolitan students behave differently. Metropolitan students with UAI scores in the bottom decile of the distribution have the highest propensity to move. On the other hand non-metropolitan students with a low score are half as likely to move to attend university as their counterparts in the top decile. The most interesting feature of the analysis is that even where non-metropolitan students with high UAI scores have good access to an institution they still have a higher than average propensity to move to attend university.

The influence of socio-economic circumstances such as economic resources, education and occupation structure and unemployment rate of the area are reasonably significant factors in the decision to move. However, these factors are not as important as subject choice and academic ability and the results of the analysis are not clear cut. The same holds true for gender and language background.

Overall, the implication of these findings is that greater provision of places in non-metropolitan areas will not prevent students from leaving country areas. However, there is room for optimism in that some regional universities are attractive in niche areas. The overall message for regional universities is they must focus on being attractive to local students.

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