Article
University Choice and Students’ Migration: An Application of the Heckman Model*
Minsoo Park1, Chandong Koo2, Jeungil Oh3,*
1Park Minsoo, primary author, is an assistant professor in the School of Economics, Chung-Ang University, Korea. His research interests include industrial organization, regulation, and applied econometrics. E-mail:
mpark@cau.ac.kr.
2Koo Chandong is an instructor in the Department of Defence Technology and Administration, Korea. His research interests include policy evaluation, land policy, and justice theory. E-mail:
k9004@daum.net.
3Oh Jeungil, is an assistant professor in the School of Public Administration, Kyungpook National University, Korea. His research interests include cost-benefit analysis, public finance, and law and economics. E-mail:
jo31@knu.ac.kr.
© Copyright 2010 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received: Apr 07, 2010; Revised: Jun 12, 2010; Revised: Jul 02, 2010; Accepted: Jul 29, 2010
Published Online: Aug 31, 2010
Abstract
This study attempts to elucidate the migration patterns of Korean high school students choosing a university. Estimating a migration equation without considering sample-selection bias would yield incorrect results. Thus, this study used the Heckman model. We found that the sample selection bias would be serious in the case of students living in Seoul. We also found that students living in small towns had a 13.1 percent higher probability of migrating than those residing in Seoul, and an 8.2 percent higher probability than those living in other big cities. The differences in the migration probabilities can be interpreted as a preference for metropolitan areas. A simple policy that provides physical and financial resources to the universities would not be successful. A higher-education policy is likely to be effective only when it is implemented in coordination with the cultural and economic policies of the region.
Keywords: university choice; migration; preference for metropolitan areas; Heckman model
