A model of student migration

Recently, along with diminishing numbers of students, it has been observed that some graduate programs still have lots of students, whereas other fields of study suffer from a great loss of students. Apparently, students do not distribute evenly over the fields that a university offers. The relations among the number of students in different fields of concentration are not constant. In particular, the harder subjects appear to suffer more from a diminishing number of students than the fields with a reputation of being somewhat "softer." The reasons for such trends must be expected to be related to the size of the market, and to psychological effects. Our study has been motivated by attempts to model economic mechanisms that are related to advertising [Feichtinger, 1992]. We have constructed a mathematical model that is able to explain trends such as reported above.