Impact of High-Speed Railways on Student Preference among Turkish Provinces: A Gravity Model Approach

In Türkiye, students are admitted to universities through centralized examinations, which enable them to choose cities outside the residential town. Over the past two decades, Türkiye has expanded higher education by establishing new universities and augmenting the enrolment capacities of existing universities. Therefore, each province has at least one state university, depending on the potential demand for higher education in the corresponding region. The establishment of new universities around the country has led to an increase in student mobility among provinces. We employ a gravity model to analyse higher education student mobility among Turkish provinces, positing that both cities' distance and potential student population influence student movement between the provinces. We utilise the R package thestats, created by Çavuş and Aydın (2022), which is based on the YÖK-ATLAS data from 2018 to 2020. Our findings suggest that the gravity model explains the student flows among the provinces of Türkiye.