Holger Jahnke (Department of Human Geography at Humboldt University, Berlin)

My PhD thesis deals with the spatial mobility of graduates in the context of peripheral regions in Europe. It integrates different aspects of student and graduate mobility and their effect on regional development, using Sicily as a case study.

My research project started in November 1997 and I count on finishing by the end of 2000.

Since January 1999 the project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The supervisor is Prof. Dr. Bodo Freund (Humboldt University).

The project touches upon the theories of "brain drain" and "skilled migration", which describe the spatial mobility of people with high levels of formal (or informal) education. Until today, there are vivid discussions about the effects of spatial mobility of graduates on regional development.
Many human capital theorists have attempted to measure the economic effects of a rising level of education by using the rate of return of investment as main indicator. Social implications, however, have usually been neglected.
In order to better understand the causes and effects of out- and return-migration of students and graduates, I intend to analyze the situation in Sicily first with regard to the island as a whole and the locally. For this reason, an analysis of the situation of graduates in their local context as well as the integration of returned graduates in their labor market and community will be carried out.
In a first stage, patterns of student and graduate mobility from and to Sicily are being identified and analyzed. This quantitative analysis focuses on the inter- and intraregional disparities in educational attainment, mobility of students and graduates as well as participation rates of students from Palermo in the Erasmus/Socrates program.
In a second stage, interviews with graduates in their local environment in Sicily as well as graduates that live or have lived outside of Sicily are carried out in order to find out more about their decisions to migrate, to remain in or return to their home environment. In this second stage, the role of social capital in the decision making process will be analyzed.

The project aims at a better understanding of the role of university education and student and graduate mobility for regional development, especially in the light of a European integration. Even though it is not dealing with international migration in a narrow sense, I want to focus on the aspect of incorporation of returning graduates in their home community. In my opinion, the cultural distance between a student who studied in another city or even abroad not only determines his decision to migrate later on, but also his role in the community he or she resides in.