Erschließung exogener Potenziale zur Verringerung des drohenden Fachkräftemangels in Thüringen: Zur besonderen Rolle internationaler Studierender und hochqualifizierter Arbeitskräfte
(Activating exogenous potentials to reduce the projected skill shortage in Thuringia: the special role of international students and highly qualified workers)
2016–2019
Silke Übelmesser, Tina Haußen, Stefan Töpfer
together with Sebastian Henn (Chair of Economic Geography), Claudia Hillinger (International Office) and other
The projected demographic change in Thuringia will lead to a skill shortage with important medium- and long-term challenges. Up to now, policies have very often focused on activating endogenous potentials while largely neglecting exogenous potentials, in particular international students and qualified workers. A promising approach could include measures (1) to help international students to enter the labor market in Thuringia and (2) to raise Thuringian companies' awareness about this potential.
Against this background, the project aims at improving the capacity of Thuringian companies to attract and retain international graduates and skilled workers. Several goals follow:
Find more information on the project here.
The projects' results have been published:
Conference
For information on the closing conference of the project see here.
Papers
Koenings, Fabian, Tina Haussen, Stefan Toepfer and Silke Uebelmesser (2019): Coming to Stay or to Go? Stay Intention and Involved Uncertainty of International Students, Jena Economic Research Papers (JERP) 2019-005, Jena.
Countries compete for young talents to alleviate skilled-labor shortage. International students, who stay after graduation, allow host countries to overcome those challenges. This study investigates the factors associated with international students’ intention to stay or to go after graduation. In contrast to the existing literature, this analysis employs survey data collected at the beginning of the studies. This assures that the analysis is not distorted by attrition and provides policymakers with more time for interventions. At the same time, it requires to deal with uncertainty as the actual migration decision will only be due in a few years. This study introduces a set of uncertainty models to the migration context to account for this. It finds that the results are largely robust across the different models: lower economic growth in the home country, a stay in the host country before the studies and being enrolled in a Bachelor program instead of a Master program are significantly associated with the intention to stay with certainty. Furthermore, Master students are found to be more uncertain than Bachelor students.