Exploring Institution-Based Mobility: Which Universities Attract Athletes from Distant and Diverse Locales?

Institutions are powerful forces in modern society -- they affect human mobility, and are constantly pushing and pulling individuals across geographic space. Institution data is rarely including in studies of mobility, although we find these data to be a rich source of information on human mobility. We visit over 1000 U.S. University athletics web pages from 78 universities, 20 different types of sports, to produce a 90,000+ record dataset of U.S. And international student athletes and their hometowns. This new agent-based origin-destination data set has not been previously gathered into one file for public use. For each university, we measure its "pull power", i.e. Its ability to attract students from many different, and distant hometowns. From these data, we explore the mobility of students from different universities and find witch institutions are catalyzing human migration and movement to 'powerful' extents.