The entrance behaviour of university candidates and the occupation behaviour of university graduates from Saku region, Nagano Prefecture

Because of the geographically unbalanced distribution of universities, regional disparities at the higher educational level in Japan have been formed by two migration-related behaviours: the entrance behaviour of university candidates and the occupation behaviour of university graduates. The purpose of this paper is to detect mechanisms of regional disparities by analysing these two behaviours in Saku region, the eastern part of Nagano Prefecture, at both the regional and prefectural scale. The results obtained are summarised as follows. Because of the small capacity of universities in Nagano Prefecture, most of the university candidates in this prefecture have to go elsewhere, most of them to Tokyo. The so-called return migration rate of university graduates who were originally from Nagano Prefecture is less than half of the whole. In Nagano Prefecture, proportions of university graduates tend to be large in the urban areas with large populations. In the northern half of Saku region, proportions of university graduates are larger than in the southern half. The migration behaviour of university graduates who graduated from high schools in the Saku region falls into four categories. The major group are those who leave Nagano Prefecture when they enter university and do not return after their graduation. The next group are those who return to Nagano Prefecture. There were also disparities in the return migration rate between the northern and southern parts of Saku region. There are clear differences in occupation between those who took jobs in Nagano Prefecture and the others. In Saku region, regional disparities in opportunities for jobs, especially in private companies, have a most decisive influence on the rate of return migration. Thus the disparities in higher educational levels exhibit a tendency for an area which has a small number of university graduates to also have a low rate of university admissions and a low rate of return migration. This shows that reproductive mechanisms of regional disparities in higher educational level are at work. -from English summary