National or Regional Recruitment: “Market Area” of University Cities

The depopulation of eastern Portugal and concentration on the coast has been a longstanding process. Since 1973 new HEIs has been disseminated around the country, and nowadays, every Portuguese region holds a set of HEIs. However, those closer to the coast tend to have a higher demand than those more distant. It is not clear if each one has a kind of restricted market area, such as a spatial monopoly in its neighbouring area or a national recruitment for some of them. This paper is the first exercise of determination of these areas for the Portuguese public network of HEIs. We use a database from the Ministry of Education (DGEEC-Ministry of Education) with information of the pair, place of residence (municipality level) and respective HEI, for enrolled students. Through techniques of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA), we will look for clusters of municipalities that could be market areas for each “university city” considered. We also use fractional regression models that confirm the positive correlation between the chosen university city and the distance to the family home and belonging to the market area. Despite some overlaps, the market areas of the university cities look to be well defined.