https://slate.com/business/2018/05/college-graduates-are-moving-out-of-state-less.html
People who stay close to home for college tend to stay close to home after college, too, at least initially. Not all of them, but lots of them. It matters, of course, if jobs are available there.
People who go to super-selective colleges (other than BYU) are significantly less likely to be going to college close to home, and are significantly more likely to have a mindset that you move long distances to pursue high-quality opportunities. It’s not terribly surprising that after college they disproportionately move long distances to pursue high-quality opportunities.
More national level recruiting from fortune 500s at higher ranked schools?
What I have observed is in our small/midsize city is you are better off going to a specific local college or local law school with lots of local alumni. The network is very strong around here. The nickname of the city is often prefixed with “Small”.
I think HYPMS almost hurts except at the highest level of Corps. or Govt. The governor and federal district judges love their Ivy law grads. The other exception is Cornell, but that is for engineering only.
I thought the highest percentage of students at Ivies and NESCAC were from New England, so they aren’t moving far to go to college.
State-to-state moves are a bit misleading. States in the Northeast are small. A graduate of Brown who takes a job in Boston 50 miles away is moving between states. Ditto a graduate of Yale who takes a job in White Plains, NY, 55 miles away, or a graduate of Penn who takes a job across the river in New Jersey. Depending on the route you take, you could pass through 8 states plus the District of Columbia in making the 450-mile trip from Northern Virginia to Boston—but 450 miles gets you barely more than halfway across Texas.
Elite colleges in the Northeast do draw students from everywhere, but they still draw disproportionately from the Northeast, and I suspect an awful lot of their graduates stay in the Northeast after college. It’s hard to extrapolate from the limited data the WSJ provides online, but WSJ says 21.4% of Harvard grads stay in the Boston metro area, with New York the second most common destination, and DC and Philadelphia also significant. So my guess is, when all is said and done, well over 50% of Harvard grads stay in the Northeast Corridor. Similarly for Penn (25.6% in Philadelphia), Princeton (25.4% in New York), Yale (23.9% in New York), and Columbia (52.3% in New York)…
And most Stanford grads stay in California—32.3% are in the San Francisco metro area, plus another 9.5% in San Jose, with LA, San Diego, and Sacramento also significant destinations. New York gets sizable numbers (between 5 and 10%), while Seattle, Portland, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Boston, and DC each get 1% to 5%…
All of that’s true, but it is completely consistent with the point of the article.
I’m sure the percentage of Stanford grads who stay in California is lower than the percentage of Berkeley or UCLA (not to mention USC) grads who stay there. And there has to be a kind of asterisk on Stanford, given that the hottest job market in America is an area no part of which is more than 60-70 miles from the Stanford campus. Similarly for Columbia. Lots of people go to Stanford because they hope to work in Silicon Valley, and lots of people go to Columbia because they hope to work in NYC.
The highest percentage of Harvard/Yale/Princeton students come from the applicable region, and a high percentage remain nearby after college, but in each case that’s a percentage that would be ultra-low for any public university or any second-tier or lower private.
The NE (DC through Portland. ME which includes Philly, NYC, Hartford, Providence, and Boston) is home to many F500 companies within major industries; financial, pharma, biotech, tech, medical, education, etc.) There are also hundreds (literally) of quality schools. Very concentrated area. So local and non local kids come to the area to get a good education and a good job. They both “stay” there. Same for Silicon Valley. isn’t that the real issue? If you want to work in biotech, doesn’t it make more sense to go to a school in that geographic area (where there are more internship and partnering opportunities?
If ur not going to grad school, and want job right after undergrad, then go to Stanford. If not, then don’t go and ruin ur chances of grad school
@JHS, Here’s the part of the article I’m quibbling with:
To the extent this implies that graduate of selective colleges end up in some uniform mix of cities, it’s misleading at best. It’s true that graduates of highly selective schools in the Northeast do end up in a “remarkably similar” set of Northeastern cities, albeit in a different mix: more Harvard grads end up in Boston than any other city, more Penn grads in Philadelphia, while New York is the most common destination for graduates of Columbia (52.5%), Cornell, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Dartmouth. And they also tend to end up in a similar mix of cities outside the Northeast—led by San Francisco, LA, and to a lesser extent Chicago, Atlanta, and Seattle.
But highly selective schools in other regions have their own regional flavors. A majority of Rice grads stay in Texas. More than half of Stanford and Caltech grads stay in California (not just Silicon Valley, but also LA, San Diego, and Sacramento). A hefty slice of Vanderbilt grads stay in Nashville or end up in Memphis, Birmingham, or Charlotte—cities that are largely off the radar for graduates of elite schools in the Northeast, Midwest, or West.
Nor is this a public v. private thing. About half of Michigan’s alums are in major cities outside the state—about the same ratio as U Chicago and Northwestern, and they’re in pretty much the same cities. And given that Michigan’s graduating class is more than three times the size of Northwestern’s and five times the size of Chicago’s, it means the absolute numbers of Michigan alums in most of those cities is much larger.
The difference may be less than you think. WSJ data say 45.6% of UC Berkeley grads are in the San Francisco metro area, compared to 32.3% for Stanford—but Stanford also has 9.5% in the San Jose metro, which WSJ counts separately. Not so very different. It could be that UC Berkeley has more in LA and other California cities, but the WSJ graphics also show significant numbers of Stanford grads in those cities, and significant numbers of Berkeley grads in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and cities in the Northeast (but they don’t give us specific numbers). I’m extrapolating from limited data here, but from what WSJ tells us it looks like Stanford might have somewhere in the vicinity of 30% of its alums in major cities outside California, but for Berkeley that figure could easily be as high as 20%, with Berkeley having more in absolute numbers.
I’d also caution not to read too much into “hot job markets” as the explanation for alumni distribution patterns. The data used by WSJ reflect living alumni totals (or at least the subset of alumni that WSJ’s market research firm was able to track), with no special emphasis on recent graduates.
If the story isn’t talking about recent grads, then the results are very distorted if one is thinking about what going to one college or another means today. I can easily attest that there are many more Penn grads my age in the Philadelphia area than there are Penn grads my kids’ age, and I’ll bet that’s true of Boston and Harvard as well, and certainly Vanderbilt and Nashville or Memphis.
In my kids’ world, all but a handful of their college friends have migrated to New York (Brooklyn), the Boston area, Washington DC, and major West Coast cities (including not-so-major Portland). They both went to the University of Chicago, and for a few years after graduation each had lots of friends in Chicago. But now, the one who’s nine years out purports to know no one from college in Chicago, and the one who’s seven years out and lives there only has two college friends who are still around – his wife and one ex-girlfriend. The kids in their circles who grew up in Chicago have all moved to one or another coast. There’s a slight Midwestern tinge to their college friendship circles – people in the Twin Cities, Ohio, Kentucky – but it’s nothing like you would see if you looked at equivalent students who went to UIUC or Wisconsin.
Students and graduates from all states and rest of the world want to move to NY, Boston and California so competition is rough.
Texas students have lot of opportunities right here because even though it has plenty of employers, its not a popular destination for new graduates so it makes more sense for them to stay in Texas.
Texas is more affordable so within few years they can afford homes,cars, fancy vacations and comfortable lifestyle instead of paying most of their income as rent for a studio in NY or SF.
Well if we’re comparing anecdotes, @JHS, I can tell you that of my circle of friends at Michigan four decades ago, I can think of only one who is still in Michigan. Well, two, but they’re married to each other. The rest are in DC, New York, Boston, San Francisco, LA, Denver, and the Pacific Northwest. I’m back in the Midwest now, in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, but I landed here by a circuitous route that took me to DC, Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay area for multi-year stints at each stop.
I’m not sure why you want to keep making this a public v. private thing. It’s more complicated than that. And if 40-some percent of Berkeley grads stay in the Bay Area and 30-some percent of UVA grads end up in DC, maybe it’s for the same reasons that make those areas so attractive to Stanford and Ivy grads…
So where do the bright Midwestern kids go who maybe want to end up working in the Midwest? S19 interested in some LACs in the Midwest but also places like Bowdoin and Davidson. I understand that there are no guarantees but I assume that a degree from a top 20 LAC could result in a job in any city if it’s a priority in one’s job search.
^^ yes, it absolutely can. My kids have graduated from UIUC and ND- all back working in Chicago.But those schools recruit heavily to Chicago. My current college kid goes to school out east and says he wants to come back to Chicago as well. So far he’s had summer internships here after freshman/sophomore years. They were obtained through connections he made here. He’s worked with his campus career center and they’ve told him there’s a small network here of alums but also a small # of students who seek employment here so usually they’ve been able to help place kids here since most students are seeking to stay east.
I have several friends from the area whose kids started out working in NYC and have moved back- good experience living/working there but glad to get out. All have been able to get the jobs they want here. Not everyone wants to move to the east/west coasts. Family, friends, connections-basically their network is here.
I would expect it varies by major to some extent, but I would look at Midwest state schools. One of the reasons my children chose to attend UIUC was its strong job placement in Chicago. They majored in Business, where almost 80% of graduates end up working in the Chicago area.
My daughter is very happy living in Chicago, with lots of friends from U of I close by. Choosing Illinois was a great decision for her.
The University of Chicago is also in Chicago. It was a good place for my son – comprehensive curriculum, excellent core curriculum, in a big city with major league sports! After graduation his first job was in Chicago with an accounting (management consultant) firm. After 5 years he moved to NYC. So even though he grew up in the midwest, went to college there, and began his career there, he didn’t feel like he HAD to live there.
My daughter, also born in the midwest, wanted to attend school in a “real city preferably in the east.” And that she did – attended Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
Now both kids live within a few miles of one another in NY, NY. They will never live in a small town again.
Thanks everyone. S19 has done his due diligence. Not going to apply to Illinois or Chicago. Really wants liberal arts school experience. Good advice here, though, to get to career center early and try to get in touch with alums in the Midwest no matter where he ends up.
The flagship public university in any Midwestern state is a good bet for any student who wants to stay in that state or any nearby state. They all have good reputations and strong name recognition, some a bit shinier than others but that rarely matters. The better Midwestern private universities (U Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame) and LACs (Carleton, Grinnell, Macalester, Oberlin) are also a good bet. The best coastal research universities are also fine, but some (e.g., Brown) have much less name recognition in the Midwest than in the Northeast, and much less than Midwesterns schools…
Coastal LACs, even the best of them, generally have even less name recognition in the Midwest. That’s probably not a big negative in the job market, but it might depend somewhat on the type of work and local job market conditions. And after the first job it matters hardly at all, because after that any employer will be more interested in the skills and performance you can demonstrate from your first and subsequent jobs than where you went to college. I know plenty of graduates of top Northeastern LACs who have gone on to very successful careers in the Midwest.
Chicago is just crawling with Northwestern, U Chicago, Notre Dame, Michigan,. Wisconsin, and UIUC grads, but also many from other Big Ten schools, Midwestern LACs, and good local schools like Loyola, DePaul, and UIC, as well as other public universities in Illinois and nearby states.
Here in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin are generally the big names, but U Iowa and Iowa State are also well represented, as are Carleton, Macalester, Grinnell, St. Olaf, St. Thomas, St. John’s-St. Ben’s, and the many second-tier public universities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas. But I’ve also met successful graduates of Bowdoin, Williams, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley, among others.
No data, just long time observation. Students from top schools tend to start out at top companies which tend to be in major cities. A lot of these are clustered in the NE, Silicon Valley, etc. Students from “average” schools (including most state Us) tend to stay local (in state). Both a function of ambition (many if not most go to state U and want to stay in state) and on campus recruiting. The top companies recruit the top schools for national positions. Average schools get local company recruiting and top company for local offices. No reason for Deloitte to recruit a UF kid to their SF office. They’ll recruit her to their Tampa office all day long and let the SF office handle local recruiting. they’ll also recruit at top tier schools and give the candidate options of which office they want because they need to in order to be competitive recruiting at top tier schools.