Higher Education Analytics: A Study of the Flow of College Applicants between US States

The dispersion of talent within the United States is not uniform. There is sufficient statistical evidence to suggest that there is an interstate brain drain phenomenon occurring within the country. The authors set out to examine this by first determining whether states could be classified into four broad categories of talent: ‘repel', ‘loyal', ‘magnet' and ‘boring'. To do this they observed the relative pull or push of talent and looked at the results relative to which states tended to retain or lose their native talent, as well as which states tended to attract a large or small number of the migratory student population seeking education outside of their own respective home states. Once they completed this categorization, the authors attempted to see whether within these groupings, a set of randomly selected independent attributes or themes could be statistically significant to support these categorizations.