Universities and other higher education institutions are frequently asked to justify, in
economic terms, the allocation of state funds toward their programmes. These institutions
often respond by conducting economic impact studies. The traditional approach to
economic impact studies views increases in expenditure by a university as a means to
increase new jobs and to expand a region’s economic base. Recent studies have employed
a new approach that also accounts for increases in a region’s skills base as part of the
economic impact. Although the skills-base approach yields favorable results for higher
education, recent applications of the technique fail to consider fully the effects of migration
on a university’s economic impact and, thus, substantially overestimate the impact