Real mentors called, but couldn't convince Indian students to move to Mumbai for college
After peer mentors called to describe urban university life, applications to local tier-2 cities rose, but applications to Mumbai and Pune barely budged—it's not information blocking them, but the true cost of moving itself.
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The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
Students need 129% higher earnings to leave home for college
In a sample of over 1,600 high school seniors in Maharashtra, researchers calculated that on average, students needed a projected 129% increase in post-graduation income to accept studying at a university elsewhere—a massive indifference point measurable in money, not merely a vague attachment to home. The penalty scaled with distance: 39% for the state capital, 93% for Pune, 196% for Mumbai, and 303% for the more distant Nagpur, showing that distance itself is an independent cost variable.
— Merve DemirelJust 70 local spots, but 10,000 across the state
Merve uses engineering as an example: if students look only locally, available slots might total just 70; if they look elsewhere in the state, the count refreshes to roughly 10,000, and the best schools cluster in cities like Mumbai and Pune. In other words, students in the sample theoretically face enormous opportunity gradients, yet the vast majority still choose not to pursue these better opportunities—a massive gap between opportunity and action.
— Merve DemirelStudents know earnings are higher elsewhere, yet won't move
The survey found students aren't information-starved: when asked about expected salaries, they believed studying in the state capital, Pune, or Mumbai would yield 16% to 30% higher post-graduation earnings than staying local—and even after discounting higher living costs and job-finding risk, most still expected net gains. In other words, the gap in understanding economic returns is not the crux—what truly blocks migration is some unnameable cost beyond returns.
— Merve DemirelPutting the pain of leaving home into income-percentage terms
To quantify this ineffable cost, Merve designed a discrete choice experiment: students repeatedly chose between two fictional universities where major, location, expected salary, and living expenses were experimentally varied, while locking conditions each student could afford and qualify for. This allowed her to convert the negative utility of 'being away from home' into a percentage increase in income needed to offset it—the 129% figure emerged this way, wholly independent of students' beliefs about earning that much, a purely valuation-based calculation of utility.
— Merve DemirelSafety and loneliness, itemized and priced out, question by question
To verify what exactly the migration penalty contained, Merve asked students directly: Living in Pune, how safe would daily travel feel (1 to 10)? How much would parents approve? How would people back home view you? How lonely would you be? All these subjective expectations worsened with distance from home. When these beliefs entered the model, the migration-penalty coefficient shrank by roughly half to 60%, showing that concrete worries—'unsafe,' 'lonely,' 'judged'—genuinely composed the substance of the 129% penalty, not merely an abstract label.
— Merve DemirelMentors' calls went through, but nobody wanted to go to Mumbai
The most counterintuitive result emerged in the intervention phase: students assigned to migrant mentors (same gender, same major, already studying in Mumbai or Pune, via phone calls) saw applications to the state capital rise 4.9 percentage points, but applications to distant cities like Pune and Mumbai barely shifted. Merve's reading: lightweight phone conversations couldn't alter the real cost of moving to a big city, and after chatting with someone who'd done it, students actually grew more convinced that 'staying local or nearby is fine'—the conversation reinforced their existing judgment rather than dispelling doubt.
— Merve DemirelFemale students face three times the migration penalty of males
Women made up 60% to 65% of the sample, and their migration willingness-to-pay was roughly three times men's. Decomposing revealed: the negative utility women and men attached to 'studying elsewhere' differed little; the real gap lay in women's far lower baseline expected salary—the same income rise translates to a much larger percentage gain for them. Women also had worse subjective expectations about life away from home across the board. Intervention results bore this out: men showed changes in application and migration behavior; women barely responded, because the gap the intervention had to move was too wide—one phone call wasn't nearly enough.
— Merve DemirelPolicy should ask how to let female students migrate safely
Merve stresses that safety anxiety isn't imagined fear but real costs students accurately priced into decisions—cabs cost more than packed buses, rent in safe neighborhoods costs more, these are concrete expenses. Her conclusion: simply correcting information gaps or encouraging migration alone may prove insufficient, even unlikely to raise welfare; policy design must tackle both 'how to help students reach opportunities' and 'how to lower real non-monetary costs,' and for female students the question should be how to let them migrate safely, not merely how to let them migrate.
— Merve DemirelIn their own words · checked verbatim
The average student would need an increase equal to 129 percent of expected postgraduate earnings to accept studying away from home.
Shruti Rajagopalan3:10
namely the puzzle where there are large opportunity gaps across space, but it is accompanied by low migration rates.
Merve Demirel5:25
The available spots for them can go from 70 to 10,000 or something.
Merve Demirel10:35
imagine if you were studying in Pune, how safe do you think you would feel in your daily life just moving around in the city from one to ten?
Merve Demirel22:10
It's really that students, I think, are coming out of these conversations thinking, you know, I think it's great to stay at home or at least close by to home.
Merve Demirel33:45
I find that that willingness to pay estimate is approximately three times as large as the male students.
Merve Demirel39:06
So what we should be thinking about is how do we make girls migrate safely and not just how do we make girls migrate.
Merve Demirel50:32
Figures
| Average migration penalty | 129% expected post-graduation earnings | 3:10 |
| Migration penalty by destination (ascending) | State capital 39% / Pune 93% / Mumbai 196% / Nagpur 303% | 3:10 |
| Sample size | 52 schools, over 1,600 high school seniors (Maharashtra) | 2:08 |
| Mentor intervention lift on state-capital applications | 4.9 percentage points | 4:20 |
| Students' expected earnings gains from migration | 16%–30% | 13:38 |
| Female students' migration willingness-to-pay relative to males | Approximately 3 times | 39:06 |
| Sample gender composition | Women 60%–65% | 39:06 |
| Local vs. state-wide engineering slots | 70 vs. approximately 10,000 | 10:35 |
Glossary
- discrete choice experiment
- Repeatedly asking respondents to choose between fictional options to infer how much an attribute is worth by reverse-engineering from choice patterns.
- non-pecuniary costs
- Intangible but real costs within migration—loneliness, insecurity, social judgment—not directly measurable in money.
- willingness to pay
- Income percentage increase a student needs to expect to offset some negative utility from leaving home.
- migration penalty
- The core metric: the percentage increase in post-graduation earnings a student must expect to justify leaving home for university.
How to listen
Researchers and policymakers concerned with higher-education migration, spatial labor mismatch, and gender and education policy.
26:28–29:33, a segment on mentor recruitment and training processes—less relevant to understanding the core conclusions.