Where do regional influences matter? The impact of socio-spatial indicators on transitions from secondary school to university

The paper at hand concentrates on how regional indicators influence school graduates’ transitions to university in and outside their home region. Our paper contributes to the literature in three ways: We include not only study opportunities in the region but focus on three distinct regional factors; namely, the economic situation, the university orientation as well as study opportunities. Furthermore, we quantify the spatial radius in which the three regional indicators affect individuals’ transition to university. Beyond that, the analyses cover a period of 26 years to infer on developments in the relevance of regional factors over time. To do so, geographic information on regions is used and aggregated within travel-time radii. The data is linked to panel data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Our findings indicate that, school graduates’ chances to enter university depend on labor-market conditions as well as on university infrastructure. We find that spatial radius matters; significant regional associations can only be observed up to radii of 60-minutes of travel time. Regional influences on the chance to enter university and the place of study increase over time.