[curiouscat321]

I grew up in Michigan and I love seeing how the ecosystem has grown.

Talent retention is a major problem for the state. The brain drain really stems from the University of Michigan. I don’t think there’s a public state university in America that sends so many of its graduates out of the state after graduation. The data is a little sparse, but the career center estimates something like 66% of all graduates leave post-graduation. In Computer Science, it’s like 75% (and I think that’s low).

The fact is, those graduates are the ones that attract jobs and startups. We talk about how egalitarian tech is. But, the fact is that companies want to hire graduates from premier colleges first and then settle for others later (at least for new grads).

Michigan’s economy is so automotive dependent because companies without a Michigan presence can’t hire UMich grads in state en masse. Nobody wants to create a new office out-of-state to hire new graduates from other schools.

I’m speculating that we tend to hear more about startups from top-tier college graduates because those graduates have a bigger cushion thanks to their degrees. A UMich/Harvard/MIT graduate can very easily fall back on their degree to get a regular job if their startup fails. (Yes, I realize there’s a socioeconomic component here as well)

[bumby]

>something like 66% of all graduates leave post-graduation.

This isn’t surprising to me considering 47% are out-of-state students to begin with (at undergraduate level, at least)[1]. This is a very different picture than the rates of a comparable public university like UCLA or UC Berkeley.

Not too sound too skeptical but I’m doubting UofM would try to change this due to the financial incentives of receiving out-of-state tuition.

[1] https://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/almanac/Alm...

[Veelox]

By reputation, University of Michigan has a very good engineering program. It's good enough that if you finish you can get a job anywhere else. It's kind of sad that if the school was worse more people would stay in state.

Long term I think the best bet is let people go and get experience and find a way to get them to move back later in life.

[Iefthandrule]

Is it really a brain drain if many of the top students at the University of Michigan came from out of state (New York/Jersey or California or overseas [Europe/Israel/India/Nigeria/China]) in the first place?