Pull Factors Attracting Romanian Students to Babeș-Bolyai University

Abstract

Student recruitment and the geographic area from where a university is recruiting its students play a key part in institutional development and in the position a university holds in national and international rankings. Therefore, successful universities assign important resources to attracting students to the educational programmes they offer. The location of the university also plays an important role in student motivation when choosing an educational offer. In this article, we focus on the main pull factors that attract students to Babeș-Bolyai University of ClujNapoca, we analyze how the city and the university's pull factors have changed in the past years, assuming that these changes, namely the institution's and the city's increasing attractiveness, had an influence on the recruitment area of students. Our hypothesis is that the increasing attractiveness leads to more students coming from a national recruitment area, instead of local and regional areas, where the main base of students of the institution used to be in the past. In the second part of this article we present recruitment data for the past five years, focusing on the recruitment area and the county of origin of the students, in order to confirm our hypothesis.