Postgraduate migration behaviour of international university students supported from the Czech Development Cooperation scholarships

Abstract

Abstract The development impacts of international scholarships for students from the Global South are most commonly understood through the expansion of human capital in the students' home countries for which the scholars' return analysed in this paper represents a key prerequisite. Utilising the theory of planned behaviour, this paper examines factors influencing the plans to return and actual postgraduation migration behaviour of 430 grantees of the Czech scholarship programme financed from the official development aid. One half of the current grantees reported plan to return, and only the 31% of alumni respondents actually returned suggesting a risk of brain drain. We found that economic integration rather than perceived sociocultural integration influences migration decision making of international students. We show how the propensity to return to scholars' home countries can be estimated from cross‐sectional data. A graphical path model was developed, which helps to understand drivers of postgraduate migration behaviour of international students.