Brain Drain Across the United States

States which retain and attract highly-educated adults stand to reap substantial economic benefits. At the same time, those that bleed much of their homegrown talent will see their economic fortunes decline if they fail to replace the leavers with highly-educated out-of-staters. Yet even if they do manage to offset their losses, these states are still losing a vital source of social capital.

What is more, the outmigration of highly-educated adults has almost certainly played a role in the deterioration of civil society in struggling communities across the country. And to the extent that the geographic mobility of the highly-educated has increased social bifurcation, it has likely exacerbated distrust of and intolerance toward people who hold different beliefs. One need only glance at today’s polarized political environment to see these attitudes on display.

Our research finds that states that are doing the best—low gross brain drain and net brain gain—generally cluster along the Boston-Washington corridor and on the West Coast: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, California, Oregon, and Washington. Other brain gain states are regional hubs—Hawaii, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and Illinois. Several of these states experienced high gross brain drain and net brain drain in 1970, but have reversed course; others have seen continued good prospects or improvements on one or both measures. For the most part, these states are home to what Richard Florida would describe as “winner-take-all cities.”

On the other hand, states in the Southeast, in the Rust Belt, and in other parts of the country tend to fare much worse when it comes to retaining and attracting the highly-educated. Several states in the Southeast—West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—had low gross brain drain and net brain gain in 1970, but today generally experience high gross brain drain as well as net brain drain. Most Rust Belt states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri—have done poorly on these measures in both 1970 and 2017. Perhaps unsurprisingly, states that defy these regional trends (for example, Illinois in the Rust Belt, and Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia in the Southeast) seem to be attracting highly-educated out-of-staters to their dynamic metropolitan hubs.