Drivers and patterns of students’ and graduates’ mobility in Poland

In this paper we use a unique, large dataset collected from a social networking website to develop a typology of the educational and post-educational mobility in Poland, to identify regions that are winning or losing in terms of human capital accumulation, and to elaborate on factors of human capital migration using empirical model of interregional flows of students and graduates. We find out that the mobility of Poland’s human capital is rather low, with graduates being more prone to migrate than students while enrolling to universities. The average Polish region manages to absorb one third of incoming students (born and raised in other regions) on the local labour market, and it pulls back about 50% of students who originated from the region, but studied elsewhere. However, only five of sixteen Polish regions experience net gain of human capital in consequence of skilled migration. All of them include big metropolitan cities – Warsaw, Poznań, Gdańsk, Wrocław, and Kraków. The remaining eleven regions are subjects of a brain drain. Physical distance between potential donor and destination regions is the most significant determinant of human capital flow. Although distance plays crucial role in both student and graduate decisions, it is more significant at student level. Students prefer to migrate to large metropolitan cities, regardless of their economic performance. In turn, graduates are more willing to leave the areas with low GDP per capita. They migrate to affluent regions, with large central cities, although, as a qualified labour force, they don’t care much for unemployment rate. The share of population with higher education is also a significant pull factor.