Between 1990 and 2006, the stock of recent college graduates, aged 22 to 27, declined by 3.6 percent in New England. The Pacific region meanwhile experienced a 27.2 percent increase over the same period, the South Atlantic a 32.3 percent increase, and the Mountain region, the states layering the Rockies, saw a monstrous 95.4% leap in recent college graduates. While New England’s poor showing can be partly attributed to a slower than average population growth during the 1970s and 1980s, it is clear that we, New England, retain less college graduates than other parts of the United States.
New England has a serious affliction known as “Brain Drain.” Put simply, “Brain Drain” means that educated people, usually younger people, leave towns, cities, states, regions, and countries for better opportunities elsewhere. The result is slow economic decay.
We don’t really associate New England, the origin of American industrialization, with economic decay – so what’s going on?
Look at Rhode Island. Driven by retreating college graduates, Rhode Island’s population growth has been negative since 2003. Graduates are leaving Rhode Island in droves, not because of the weather, a common misconception, or housing issues, but because of a perceived absence of job opportunities. I say perceived because in reality there are jobs to be had by capable candidates – but students assume they don’t exist. Those assumptions are born from Rhode Island’s widely known economic outlook: poor.
Great jobs exist in Rhode Island. It’s only a matter of introducing them to college students before it’s too late. How do you do that? Internships. In Philadelphia, where in 2004 only 64% of college graduates remained in the region, the Pennsylvania Economy League discovered that the single most successful remedy for “Brain Drain” was providing college students with more internship opportunities. They wrote: “Far from just providing work experience, internships expose students to academic, cultural and social opportunities they never knew existed beyond the campus gates.” As it turned out, over half of the 64% of students who stayed near Philadelphia after graduating had internships there during college.
Similarly in Boston, a 2008 study commissioned by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce found that expanding and advertising internship programs for college students was pivotal to retaining graduates. Internship programs, they said, “enable students and employers to ‘try each other out,’ and they expose students to the advantages of living and working in Boston.”
OK, we know what’s causing “Brain Drain”, and we learned of a powerful cure, but how do we administer that medicine? How can we put more internship opportunities in front of students? The answer is by creating an online platform that makes it easier for students to find internships offered by local employers, and for local employers to find potential student interns. The City of Philadelphia, for example, responded to the Economy League’s dire report by creating www.careerphilly.com, a student-only Philadelphia internship and job search platform.
In Rhode Island, we’re responding by building Jobzle. We think Rhode Island’s “Brain Drain” is more severe than Boston’s or Philadelphia’s, so we’re building a much more robust online platform for internships than either of those cities has created to date: a stronger medicine for a bigger problem. We have better tools for employers, a better user experience for students, and we’re heavier on marketing opportunities to both sides –internships to students, and students to employers. Jobzle is going to take all of those fantastic Rhode Island internships that are floating around on different websites throughout the state, and bring them to a central location where students can quickly and easily find the opportunities that apply to them.
We’re about to be harvesting some serious knowledge for the State of Rhode Island. I hope they’re ready!
