English coastal towns ‘lose one in three graduates’ to cities

Some coastal towns in England lose more than a third of their graduates as part of a “brain drain” of talent to larger cities, according to a new report.

Just one in eight young adults in places such as Grimsby in Lincolnshire or Clacton in Essex had a degree despite almost a fifth of the same cohort who grew up in the towns graduating from university, the study suggests.

Researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysed linked data sets on school achievement, university participation and employment to assess how higher education might affect geographical mobility.

They found that on average graduates were 10 percentage points more likely to have moved away from the area where they grew up when background factors such as prior attainment and socio-economic status were taken into account.

However, although graduates tended to see large gains in earnings by moving to London and other major cities – on average 10 per cent more for men and 4 per cent for women – it also led to a major brain drain from parts of the North and coastal towns.

The area with the highest net loss of graduates was the coastal town of Bridlington in Yorkshire, where although 23 per cent of school pupils gained a degree, just 13 per cent of the same cohort still living in the area were graduates by the age of 27.

At the same time, London – which already had a higher share (35 per cent) of school leavers going on to get a degree anyway – attracted even more graduates, so that 44 per cent of the same cohort living in the capital aged 27 held a degree.

Xiaowei Xu, a senior research economist at the IFS and an author of the report, which was commissioned by the Department for Education, said that addressing regional inequality would require focusing on ways to persuade graduates to live and work in some areas of the country.

“In moving from more deprived areas to London and other cities, graduates improve their own career prospects, but this exacerbates geographical inequality in skills,” she said. “As well as ‘levelling up’ educational attainment across the country, policymakers should think about how to attract and retain talent in places that are currently less well-off.”

Similar to another study on UK graduate mobility published this week, the IFS report – London calling? Higher education, geographical mobility and early-career earnings – also found that graduates from ethnic minorities and lower socio-economic backgrounds were less likely to move.

For instance, young people from the poorest families were only 4 percentage points more likely to move if they graduated from university when accounting for other factors.

Meanwhile, young adults of Indian and Pakistani ethnicity were about 7 percentage points less likely to have moved by age 27 than white British people, and black and Asian graduates were no more mobile than otherwise similar non-graduates.

Ben Waltmann, also an IFS senior research economist and a co-author, said: “Reducing barriers to geographical mobility of such graduates could be an important way to improve their labour market outcomes and hence boost social mobility.”

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com