<p>
As Ned Flanders said, “who knew Heaven was easier to get into than Arizona State!”</p>
<p>NJ has been a top exporter of students since I was in that group way back in the 60’s. Many do not even consider instate schools but they do return to work after college either in NYC or NJ.</p>
<p>^ No left turns, high taxes and not being able to pump your own gas are possibly some reasons…</p>
<p>^^^I would think with the close proximity of most of the northeastern states to each other, this situation would not really be all that unusual. New Jersey is a small state with a large population that is located right next to two very large cities not within it’s state’s boundaries.</p>
<p>Not to mention NJ has one of the highest income profiles in the US.</p>
<p>Yep, I mean what awesome universities are there in New Jersey besides the obvious one? You either go to Rutgers or you go out of state. The Ivies, Wake, Duke, Stanford, Wisconsin, Illinois, Emory and Michigan are flooded with New Jersey residents.</p>
<p>Some might say the College of NJ and Princeton</p>
<p>You could make the same argument about Pennsylvania: heavily populated, close to NY, Baltimore and Washington DC. They also have one Ivy League university and several state schools, none of which are considered among the best. Still they have managed much better than their neighbors and are attracting far more OOS students than it loses to other states. They are only second to Arizona for net inflow of OOS students. They must have done something right!</p>
<p>Being close to NJ/NY helps a lot.</p>
<p>Lots of private/public schools around Philadelphia. Actually I believe the Philly area has the second largest collegiate population in the U.S. after Boston.</p>
<p>^ Perhaps…Seattle and San Francisco are close.</p>
<p>Actually NYC has to have the most college students in it, just from sheer numbers of being by far the largest city in the US.</p>
<p>As far as total college students in the respective metro areas:</p>
<ol>
<li>LA 630,000</li>
<li>NY 625,000</li>
<li>Chicago 446,000</li>
<li>Dallas/Ft Worth 309,000</li>
<li>Boston-Cambridge 284,000</li>
<li>SF-Oakland 260,000</li>
<li>Washington DC 250,000</li>
<li>Philadelphia 235,000</li>
</ol>
<p>Oh, I got you. I thought you meant most educated city (highest percentage with college degree).</p>
<p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>“Worst”? I’m not sure why you see this as a negative. To me it just looks like high educational mobility. By your measure, Massachusetts is also performing poorly in higher education, with 30% of its residents going elsewhere to attend college. (Never mind that 37% of the enrolled college freshmen in the state came from somewhere else). </p>
<p>I’d characterize Mississippi and possibly Utah as “low educational mobility” states–no one comes for higher education, no one leaves for higher education (though BYU does attract a few OOS students, mostly Mormons; I don’t know if that adds much cultural diversity). To my mind, that kind of insularity is a negative, not a positive. Arizona and Alabama are maybe in a little different situation because, while they don’t export many students, they import significant numbers. Relative to its size, California doesn’t import or export many, but that may be partly because it’s just so danged big that internal migration absorbs most of the energy.</p>
<p>The ability to retain college graduates is generally considered a high priority by most states, hence incentives such as low in-state tuition rates. Studies show that college students often stay in the state they graduate from and more often than not, do not move back to their state of origin. </p>
<p>Utah clearly benefits from a highly educated workforce. This can be contrasted with its neighbor, New Mexico. </p>
<p>It is OK if the loss of resident students is compensated by an even greater influx of out of state students (VT, MA, RI), but when you have both a low in-state retention AND a low OOS student population, you have problems (Alaska, MD, NJ).</p>
<p>NJ has no problem attracting college grads to live there after college. Neither does MD. Jobs attract people as does the location.</p>
<p>The loss of college students is clearly a significant concern for the NJ State Government.</p>
<p>[Top</a> Colleges: News Articles](<a href=“http://topcolleges.com/news033.html]Top”>http://topcolleges.com/news033.html)</p>
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<p>Well, OK, but now you’re focusing on net in-migration or out-migration, which is very different than just the percentage of residents that you’re losing, which is what you started out talking about.</p>
<p>But I still don’t buy that analysis, cellardweller. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re North Dakota and you’ve been bleeding young people for decades, your population is aging and you’re worried whether there will be enough young people to fill the jobs and keep the economic boom going. (I’m serious, that’s the situation North Dakota finds itself in right now). But New Jersey doesn’t have trouble attracting young, educated workers, despite showing a net loss of 30,867 college freshmen in 2008. And New Jersey is the only really big loser by that measure. Texas is #2 with a net loss of 11,361, but against a much bigger population. I don’t think they’re exactly hurting for young talent, either. Third is Maryland, with a net loss of 10,651, but probably a goodly number of them went to college in neighboring Washington, DC which showed a net gain of 9,767. Then at #4 you have Connecticut with a net loss of 6,132; but New England as a whole is a net gainer, with big gains in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont more than offsetting Connecticut’s loss and smaller (almost trivial) losses in New Hampshire and Maine. And I’ll bet a lot of those Connecticut kids at Middlebury, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Amherst, Harvard, and Brown end up right back in Connecticut after college. Odd, isn’t it, that we’re talking about some of the most prosperous and high-academic-achieving states in the country here (NJ, CT, and MD, I mean; Texas not so much)? Could it just be that they’re affluent enough to send a lot of their kids away to college? </p>
<p>After those four states, the “net loss” numbers start to get pretty trivial: Georgia -4,995; Ohio -4,709; Michigan - 4,016; Minnesota -3,360; Illinois -3,045, Washington State -3,024. For most of these states those net losses represent something like 4/100ths of 1% of the state’s population. Now granted, if you keep on that track for 100 years it adds up to 4% of your population; then you might start to worry. But not with these trivial numbers. Except possibly New Jersey, because that raw number is fairly high, roughly an order of magnitude higher than most of these other states. And Alaska may have a problem; a net loss of 1,916 college freshmen is a lot in a state with a population well under a million. (Then again, there just aren’t many colleges in Alaska, and Alaskans have been going to the “lower 48” for college, and returning, for generations now). But these are outliers.</p>
<p>As for students staying where they went to college—sure, it happens sometimes, but only sometimes. I don’t think many Dartmouth grads stay in northern New Hampshire, or Bowdoin grads in Maine. Well over half the New Yorkers I knew in my undergrad days at Michigan went back to New York; most of the rest dispersed to Chicago or the West. Relatively few stayed in Michigan. Mostly people go where economic opportunities are after they graduate. If that’s New Jersey, they’ll go to New Jersey. If it’s Maryland, they’ll go to Maryland. Fewer will go to North Dakota, but that’s why this is an issue for states like North Dakota (which did pretty well in 2008, +2,111 in college freshmen, but I’ll bet most of those are Minnesotans who went for the cheap tuition and the ice hockey and will be right back in the Twin Cities once they graduate, just like every Minnesotan I’ve ever known who went to North Dakota for college).</p>
<p>And how about all those stories we keep reading about how the “new normal” is for college grads to move right back in with Mom & Dad after collecting the sheepskin? </p>
<p>As for the states with big net gains, how are they doing? Arizona’s the biggest gainer, +39,101. Impressive, especially relative to the state’s relatively modest population. The state’s economy, not so impressive, at least not right now. Number 2 is Pennsylvania, +16,484. Third is Iowa, +14,198; big number for a smallish state. But these aren’t the places you hear about having the most dynamic economies or the best educated workforces. And I’d be willing to wager that a lot of the New Jersey and Maryland and Connecticut kids at places like Penn, Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr won’t be sticking around the Philadelphia area after they graduate; they’ll either head home or head for greener pastures, but the residual economic benefit to Pennsylvania will be modest. Same for the Chicago-area and Twin Cities kids at Grinnell and Luther and all the other little liberal arts colleges in Iowa.</p>
<p>As is expected NJ is very high in the % of college degreed residents–6th in the US. Have the jobs and they will come.</p>
<p>[States</a> With The MOST College Degree Holders (PHOTOS)](<a href=“States With The MOST College Degree Holders (PHOTOS) | HuffPost College”>States With The MOST College Degree Holders (PHOTOS) | HuffPost College)</p>