Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/283986 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
Upjohn Institute Working Paper No. 23-393
Publisher: 
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo, MI
Abstract: 
This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college-specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of "brain drain" across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education.
Subjects: 
colleges
labor markets
postsecondary education
economic mobility
JEL: 
I23
I25
J21
J40
J61
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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