State Auditor Shad White’s office has provided more details about Mississippi’s “brain drain” — the trend of educated residents, especially young people, leaving the state to work elsewhere.
In 2020, the report said, only 50% of students who graduated from a Mississippi public university between 2015 and 2017 were working in the state. Similar information from earlier graduating classes suggests that by 2027, well less than half of those 2015-17 grads still will have a job in Mississippi. And an increasing number of Mississippi graduates have decided not to work in the state at all.
Some universities are doing a better job of keeping graduates from Mississippi in the state.
For the 2015-17 period, more than 70% of the graduates from Mississippi who received a degree from University Medical Center, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State and Delta State were still working in the state three years after getting a diploma.
Ole Miss (52%) and Mississippi State (58%), two of the biggest schools, had the worst records of keeping Mississippi students in the state after graduation. More than 60% of Jackson State, Southern Miss and Alcorn State graduates were working in their home state.
The auditor’s report also looked at which college majors were more likely to keep graduates in Mississippi.
In all three periods reviewed — 2015-17, 2013-15 and 2008-10, more than 70% of students who majored in education, public administration or health programs were still working in the state three years later. But less than 40% of foreign language, engineering, religious studies and physical science majors stayed in the state.
The report identified two troubling but unsurprising trends. As noted above, the percentage of more recent graduates working in Mississippi has declined. But the other one should set off even more warning flares: Two-thirds of the graduates who are still in Mississippi are working in just 10 of the state’s 82 counties.
Those 10 counties include the state’s population centers — three in the Jackson area, DeSoto County, Biloxi-Gulfport, Meridian and Tupelo — and the locations of the state’s three largest universities: Oxford, Starkville and Hattiesburg.
There can be no clearer signal that the small towns that are prevalent in much of Mississippi have become less appealing to a generation that is more mobile and more willing to relocate.
The report offers no significant solutions to a brain drain that is increasing. It notes that the state auditor’s office has started a program to pay for part of an accounting student’s education if that student agrees to work for the auditor’s office for two years.
It concludes, “The goal of both this report and the fellowship program is to start a conversation on how the state can more effectively fight against brain drain to retain talent and population.” That is literally Mississippi’s billion-dollar challenge. It’s easy to envision a significant bump in economic activity if more of our graduates would stick around. The obvious first step is to ask some of them why they left — and what might convince them to return.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
