When Gov. Abigail Spanberger spoke to the General Assembly shortly after her inauguration, she cited this statistic: “Nearly half of college students who graduate from Virginia universities leave the commonwealth within five years — above the national average.”
For regular Cardinal readers, this shouldn’t have been a surprise, because not quite a year ago, I had a column that was headlined: “Nearly half of Virginia’s college graduates leave the state within 5-10 years after they get their diplomas.”
Since the governor sees this as a problem (she’s right), let’s dig deeper, revisiting some of these numbers in different ways.
The precise figures, courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau, which look at what Virginia’s college graduates in this century have done:
Within one year of graduation, 63.4% are still in Virginia, but 36.5% are gone.
Within five years of graduation, 56.1% are still in Virginia, but 43.8% are gone
Within five years of graduation, 50.6% are still in Virginia, but 49.3% are gone.
These numbers matter for two reasons, both of them economic:
This is talent that is leaving the state. Just as sports fans fret about a college athlete who enters the transfer portal, we ought to worry about lots of our college graduates entering the economic equivalent.
For graduates of the state’s public schools, this is talent we’ve helped pay for. Every time one of those graduates leaves Virginia, taxpayers just helped pay to educate some other state’s worker.
We live in a mobile society, and education opens up job opportunities, so we’re always going to see some movement. What level of movement is high enough, though, that it warrants the attention of policymakers? And then what should that policy response be? What’s notable — and worrisome — about these statistics is that, broadly speaking, Virginia comes off looking more like a Rust Belt state than a Sun Belt state. Unfortunately, the Census Bureau doesn’t have these stats for every state, so we can’t paint a complete picture, but we can paint enough of one to see some trends.
In Pennsylvania, only 50.7% of the state’s grads are still in the state after five years. In Georgia, 72.2% are. That fits with other demographic trends: Sun Belt states attracting new residents, Rust Belt states struggling to hold onto theirs. Over time, Virginia has started to have more in common with Rust Belt states than Sun Belt ones — consistent net out-migration.
What really ought to get our attention, though, are the trend lines. Those figures I cited above cover college graduates from 2001 to 2021. When we break those down, we see that the percentage of graduates leaving Virginia has risen over time, from 41.5% in 2001-03 to 45.7% by the 2013-15 cohort of graduates, the last group for which we have five-year numbers. (All these reports are maddeningly slow.) That may not seem much of a change, but it is a change and not in the right direction.
We do have more recent data for one year after graduation, and we see that the retention rate has declined there, too, from 66.0% for the 2001-03 graduates to 60.9% for the 2019-2021 graduates.
That’s not good.
There are multiple explanations offered, all of which could be true to some degree.
Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, notes that high housing prices play a role in depressing retention of college grads. “Virginia, particularly Northern Virginia, has been attractive in the past to recent college graduates because of the high demand and high pay for graduates here,” he told me by email. “The age groups Virginia has increasingly struggled to retain are adults that are older, often those starting a family who may be unable to buy a home with a yard in Northern Virginia or retirees who have built up a good deal of equity in their home and move to a more affordable part of the country.”
Republicans typically point to migration figures and note that the Sun Belt states gaining population tend to have much lower taxes than the Rust Belt states losing population. That is undeniably true, although how much those tax rates play into the decisions of recent college grads is difficult to say. It could be a more indirect case of lower tax rates helping to spur economic growth, creating jobs that attract those grads.
However, if we drill down further into these figures, we find things are more complicated than they first appear.
Some fields have seen their retention rates decline, but others have seen their retention rates increase.
The biggest field is “business, management and marketing,” which the Census Bureau says accounts for one-third of the state’s graduates this century. Their retention rate has fallen sharply. In the early part of the century, 71.7% of the graduates in those fields were still in Virginia after one year. By the 2019-21 cohort, the one-year retention rate was down to 59%. (Although the governor cited the five-year retention rate, I’m favoring the one-year rate so we can use more recent data. While the numbers might vary, it all proves the same point, but it seems stronger to rely on the freshest data.)
That drop in the biggest single category drives a lot of Virginia’s decline. We also see sharp drops in some liberal arts fields. Some liberal arts fields have always had low retention rates. For philosophy graduates, for instance, the retention rate was just 36.6% in 2001-03 and fell to 24.9% in 2019-21.
However, for some STEM-related fields — science, technology, engineering and math — retention rates have held steady or often gone up.
Graduates with engineering degrees had a 58.7% retention rate early in the century; now their retention rate is 59.4%.
In health care-related fields, the retention rate once was 71.9%; now it’s 71.7%.
Both of those seem like just a statistical blip.
Now for the ones that are showing improved retention rates.
The retention rate of computer science grads is up slightly — from 65.0% to 69.3%.
The big jump is for graduates with biomedical-related degrees. They had a 58.7% retention rate in the early part of the century; now that’s up to 67.0% — good news for a state building a life sciences cluster.
Virginia does have a retention problem, but it’s not with graduates in STEM fields. It could be that Virginia simply doesn’t have enough jobs available in those non-STEM areas — and/or that too many students are majoring in subjects where the job prospects are better out of state than in state.
In the end, more jobs would likely lead to higher retention rates, but that also depends on what those jobs are — and what students choose to study.
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