Nearly 15 years ago, Roxanne came to Flagstaff as an AmeriCorps volunteer, certain she would stay for a year and then move on. She had not planned to fall for a town tucked into the ponderosa pines at 7,000 feet. But she did. And more than the landscape, she fell for the work ― sitting alongside first-generation students as they imagined futures that no one in their family had charted before. She had been a first-generation, Pell-eligible student herself, and Arizona gave her a place to turn that experience into a career.
Her story is not an anomaly. John arrived in Phoenix two years ago, mid-August, to start a PhD program at Arizona State. Stepping off the plane and into the record-breaking heat, John fell just as unexpectedly for the sweeping
mountains, the red canyons, and the towering saguaros of the Sonoran desert. Falling for Arizona's natural beauty was also one of the reasons why Margarita decided to stay, though the primary reason she moved to Phoenix from Canada thirteen years ago was a job offer.
Since Roxanne, Margarita, and John are all products of out-migration, we started asking why college graduates move out of the state they were educated in. We wanted to know the rate at which college graduates left Arizona, the industries that proved "stickiest" in the state, and where they would go when they left.
To answer these questions, we built the Arizona Talent Stickiness Index in partnership with the PSEO Coalition. We drew on Census Bureau data that follows bachelor's degree graduates of Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona into the labor market. For graduating cohorts between 2004 and 2019, we tracked the number of graduates still working in Arizona one, five and 10 years after they graduated.
At one year out, Arizona's three public universities retain roughly 70% of their bachelor's graduates in the state's workforce. This is a real return on the public investment Arizonans make in these institutions every year. However, five years after graduation, retention slips to about 61%. Ten years out, it settles around 58%. The graduates Arizona spent four years educating are building their careers, paying their taxes, and raising their families elsewhere.
The decline is sharpest where Arizona can least afford it. In health care, where the state is projected to add more than 113,000 jobs over the next decade, retention falls from the high 70s at one year out to the mid-50s ten years after graduation. In information technology, only 26% of U of A graduates remain in Arizona a decade after graduating. The gaps in Arizona's talent pipeline are concentrated in many of the industries the state's economic future depends on.
What the Arizona Talent Stickiness Index makes visible is a problem that was always there but never precisely located. Arizona is losing its graduates in a concentrated window between one and five years after graduation and in critical industries like health care and information technology.
That window is where the state's investment in public higher education is most at risk. The out-migration is not uniform across Arizona's three major institutions. What's more, the industries losing talent are precisely the ones Arizona's economy most depends on. Finally, when graduates leave, they are not scattering across the country. They are moving to Pacific states, primarily California, which means Arizona's public investment in educating its workforce is, in measurable part, subsidizing the economic growth of its neighbors.
This is why we've used this information to build the Arizona Talent Stickiness Dashboard. This is a publicly available, interactive tool designed for students navigating career decisions and the faculty advisors and university administrators tasked with helping them. With our dashboard, an ASU advisor sitting across from a health care student can show that student exactly what retention looks like in her state, and how it compares to other states like Texas, Colorado and Oregon. An NAU professor can see which graduating cohorts stayed in the state, and which left for other opportunities, incorporating that knowledge into how they discuss career opportunities with students in their classrooms.
We believe that informed students can make informed decisions. Universities that understand where and when they lose their graduates can build smarter interventions and programs to target those students leaving the state, ultimately raising the rate of retention for Arizona graduates in critical industries. Just as the authors of this op-ed have stayed in Arizona, we hope our data will empower others to stay in the state, enjoying the saguaros along the way.
John M. Fredericks and Roxanne Murphy are PhD students at Arizona State University working with Margarita Pivovarova, an associate professor at ASU's Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona spends 4 years educating grads. Then they leave | Opinion
