Transitions and Location Choice: Analysing the Decisions of Students and Recent Graduates

This special issue is the result of a series of sessions on graduates and the labour market, organised at the 2012 ERSA conference in Bratislava, Slovakia. The collection of papers is the first to address determinants and impact of decisions on both entry and exit from higher education, with a focus on the location and labour market decisions of students and recent graduates. The first two papers in this issue present novel analyses of the transition from high school to tertiary education; Suhonen on distance and field of study in Finland; and Faggian and Franklin on student quality and location choice in the United States. The following two articles focus on the migration patterns of recent graduates; Ahlin and Andersson on the rewards of entering labour markets in urban areas, while Kronenberg and Carree focus on the issue of residential location choice. Koster and Venhorst conclude, studying the residential and business location decisions of graduate entrepreneurs. The papers provide policy implications on the geographical spread of higher education institutions, and the short- and long-term consequences of student and graduate mobility