Human capital in remote and rural Australia: the role of graduate migration

In this paper we examine the spatial employment patterns of Australia’s university graduates in non-urban locations. Using a 2006 dataset recording the employment status of 65,661 university graduates six months after their graduation we examine how the personal and human capital characteristics of the individual university graduate affects the type of rural location into which they enter for employment purposes. The importance of identifying which types of graduates work where is essential for our understanding of the forces which are currently shaping the spatial distribution of human capital across Australia’s regions. In order to do this we allocate postcode-based data of graduate employment to one of five remoteness classes, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, that allow us to distinguish between different degrees of rurality. The postcode data is used to associate the human capital characteristics of the graduate, in terms of the types of university degrees awarded and the universities attended, as well as the personal characteristics of the graduate, are related to the degrees of rurality in their employment outcome