How Personality Shapes Study Location Choices

Abstract

In this paper I investigate undergraduate students’ discrete location choices in presence of a plethora of potential destinations and psychic costs. I demonstrate how enrolment into institutions of tertiary education is influenced by personality and social preferences. More importantly, these individual traits are found to affect the valuation of location-specific conditions in alternative study locations. Eventually, the relevance of location attributes, such as urban or labour market characteristics, varies substantially with respect to distance and individuals’ personality. This has direct implications for student recruitment, since prospective students display distinct geographic sorting patterns along these traits: students featuring higher levels of patience integrate post-graduation opportunities into their decision-making. As a consequence, institutions in economically less prosperous regions might attract a specific subset of the overall student population, which might also have repercussions on student performance.