The migration of the young professional

It may sound a bit like Wild Kingdom or some Nova special, but more cities and states are hunting and tracking young professionals. As the perceived importance of this link in the economic food chain rises, and the size of the available pool dwindles (thanks to birth rates a few decades back), governments and civic groups are becoming proactive in luring the skittish species into their nets.

According to this article, the states of Iowa, North Dakota, and Maine are working particularly hard to hold their young folks and attract others. In North Dakota, students graduating from a state university in technology and teaching can get a reimbursement of up to $5000 for remaining in the state to work. In Maine, a new proposal suggests creating a $50 million bond to help repay student loans in return for joining Maine’s workforce…up to $20,000 after four years of work.

The federal government is even tracking this sought-after group, most notably in a 2000 report entitled ”Migration of the Young, Single, and College Educated: 1995 to 2000,” available for download here.

With this competition for young folks at the state level, many cities are jumping into the game. A young professionals group in Milwaukee, for example, is developing a ”regional recruitability index” (requires login) to benchmark their city’s attractiveness to young professionals as compared to several peer cities. The efforts in some metropolitan areas are likely fueled by these inmigration/outmigration rankings that spun off of the U.S. Census numbers (I’m guessing the folks in Gainesville, Florida, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania…both showing the largest net outmigration of young professionals…are mightily concerned).

So what does this have to do with the arts? According to Richard Florida’s much-maligned but high-traction book on the Creative Class (as well as several smart folks before and since that book), a city or region’s cultural life provides much of the lure for this group. By ‘cultural life,’ he means a full range of things including recreational space, bike lanes, ‘street culture’ in the form of bars, nightclubs, and hip scenes, and a spectrum of other amenities. Florida downplays the traditional bastions of civic culture as part of this essential mix — the symphony, opera, ballet, established theater, and professional presenters. But there’s some on-going debate about the role and power of these larger institutions in their local cultural ecology.

Either way, any time civic, government, and business leaders start to panic about something, it’s a useful time to know how your nonprofit arts organization plays a role in its solution. At the very least, it’s a good idea to be at the table for the conversation.