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 fiel ds of study suffer from a great loss of students. Apparently, students do n ot distribute evenly over the fields that a university offers. The relation s 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 s omewhat "softer." The reasons for such trends must be expected to be related to the size of t he market, and to psychological effects. Our study has been motivated by at tempts to model economic mechanisms that are related to advertising [Feicht inger, 1992]. We have constructed a mathematical model that is able to expl ain trends such as reported above.