Where the College Grads Aren’t

Dayton has used internships as a glue to keep recent graduates, and the city found through a recent survey that graduates were twice as likely to stay if they had done an internship at a local business. One of them, Richard Kaiser, who graduated from Wright State University, stayed in Dayton because it was cheaper and seemed faster to advance in a career, a choice he does not regret. Friends who moved to Chicago, he said, “ended up sitting at home and drinking cheap beer and playing video games every night.”

College graduates tend to flock to cities with other young college graduates, which means San Francisco, New York, or Raleigh, N.C. where there’s a “booming technology sector and several major research universities,” so cities like Dayton in Ohio are trying to figure out how to lure more graduates. Obviously, the best way to lure a graduate is to give him or her viable job options, and also interesting things to do, because life should be more than slaving away at a job. Dayton! What are the interesting things to do in your city?

Photo: Shutterstock/Katherine Welles

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