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From Domicile to University to Work: The Sequential Migration of Young Educated People in the Context of the “Battle for Talent” in China

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Abstract

As the core driving force of technological innovation and economic development, talent is considered a scarce resource that cities and nations compete for. Facing the pressure of transitioning to high-quality development, many Chinese cities have launched various policies to retain and attract talent since 2017. Talents are comparatively more mobile flowing between regions. Educated talents, who have attended higher education, first move from domicile to university, and then move from university to work after graduation; it is a dynamic process and should be analyzed as a continuum. However, most of the existing studies analyze these two stages separately, namely, student migration and university graduate migration. This study, using the Graduate Employment Quality Report released by 12 universities in Shanghai and questionnaires collected in Shanghai, explored the spatial patterns and driving factors of the two-stage migration of graduates employing a bivariate probit model. The results showed that graduates’ place of origin is relatively diverse and geographically determined by the quota-allocation system of China’s higher-education system, while upon graduation, the majority of them stayed in Shanghai and the surrounding provinces for employment. Path dependence is revealed between domicile-to-university migration and university-to-work migration, and both of them are significantly affected by graduates’ human capital, family background, as well as city-level attributes. Among talent policies, hukou-related policies play an important role in affecting graduates’ choice of place of employment. This study contributes to the understanding of the sequential migration of human capital in a specific institutional setting, thereby providing policy implications to optimize the allocation of talents between regions.

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Notes

  1. The quota-allocation system refers to a set of enrollment policies, which allocate fixed quotas of enrollment to each province/direct-administered municipality by the state. Under this system, each university has a fixed number of students admitted from each province, and usually the quota for the province where the university is located is the highest.

  2. Hukou is a system of household registration used in mainland China. Originating from ancient China, the hukou system officially identifies a person as a permanent resident of an area, and only holding local hukou, certain social benefits are accessible.

  3. The Double First-Class Initiative is a major commitment made by the Chinese government to improve China’s higher-education power and international competitiveness. In September 2017, China officially published the list of universities and disciplines, including 42 “first-class” universities and 465 “first-class” disciplines.

  4. Following the division adopted by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, there are seven regions in China. The northeast region includes Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Jilin. The northern region includes Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia. The eastern region includes Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, Shandong, and Jiangxi. The central region includes Henan, Hubei, and Hunan. The southern region includes Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hainan. The southwest region includes Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Tibet. The northwest region includes Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Xinjiang.

  5. The Ministry of Education's notice on university admissions in 2018 (http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A15/moe_776/s3258/201803/t20180320_330717.html) pointed out that provincial recruitment committees in frontier and ethnic minority regions could lower the admission score or add certain scores to students from those regions.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42171233), the joint funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72061137072) and the Dutch Research Council (Grant No. 482.19.607), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Nos. 2022ECNU-HLYT008, 2022ECNU-XWK-XK001).

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  1. The Centre for Modern Chinese City Studies & Research Centre for China Administrative Division & Institute of Eco-Chongming, East China Normal University, North Zhongshan Road 3663, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Qiang Wang, Can Cui, Chengyuan Yu & Yifan Wang

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  1. Qiang Wang
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Wang, Q., Cui, C., Yu, C. et al. From Domicile to University to Work: The Sequential Migration of Young Educated People in the Context of the “Battle for Talent” in China. Popul Res Policy Rev 42, 92 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09838-3

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