Leaving the nest | Maine's best and brightest young people continue to leave the state. What can we do to stem the ongoing brain drain?

One night a few weeks ago, Angelique Carson, a senior at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, took a cab downtown. When the cabby discovered she was a student, he asked what she was studying. She told him she was an English major.

What happened next scared her. "He said, 'me too,'" Carson recalls.

Carson, the editor of USM's campus newspaper, The Free Press, has one semester of school left, and wants to pursue a career in journalism. But this born-and-bred South Portlander says she has no intention of doing that in her native state. "The general theme is that if you stay here in Maine you're probably going to be either poor or completely broke," Carson says. "The best bet is to get outside the state where you can make some real cash."

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem Maine faces: How to entice the best and brightest to stay when they don't believe Maine offers them a viable future? And if young Mainers like Angelique Carson do leave, how can the state create an environment that could eventually lure all this exiled talent back?

These are important questions for Maine, ones that are asked by rural states throughout the country. Economic development experts say one of the prime factors when trying to attract business is the availability of a skilled work force. The risks posed by an exodus of young educated adults are very real, especially at a time when Maine is growing older — the state recently became the nation's oldest, with a median age of 41.2 — and its workforce is thinning by the retirement of baby boomers.

So what happens if there aren't enough young bodies to replenish the labor pool? "Basically, labor becomes scarce, and as a result it becomes more expensive to hire people," says Charles Colgan, a former state economist and a professor of public policy at USM's Muskie School of Public Service. "And in some cases, particularly when people of certain skills are needed, it could become almost impossible for a company to expand or continue operations."

Currently, there are several initiatives in the state addressing this concept of brain drain. Realize!Maine, which Gov. John Baldacci founded in 2003 and heralded into existence with a statewide youth summit in June 2004, is launching several new initiatives, including a new website laden with career resources and a pilot internship program in Bangor for Husson College seniors. Also, Opportunity Maine, a citizens' initiative, wants the state to offer a tax credit to students who graduate from Maine colleges and stay in the state to live and work.

Meanwhile, grassroots young-professional groups like Kennebec Valley Connect in Waterville, which is only a few months old, and Midcoast Magnet, which has been around since 2004, are tackling the problem on a regional basis. "Maine has been struggling with the issue for 150 years," says Yellow Light Breen, the 34-year-old chief strategy officer at Bangor Savings Bank and chair of Realize!Maine's Advisory Committee, which was formed in August. "But it's maybe the first time, at least in recent memory, that the people in the affected age group are highly energized to be part of the solution."

The 1990s were, as Breen puts it, "incredibly bleak" when it came to losing young Mainers. During that decade Maine saw its number of 25- to 35-year-olds decrease by 23% — three times faster than the rest of the country — dropping from 205,000 in 1990 to 158,000 in 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Recent evidence suggests that trend may be reversing. The University of Maine at Orono recently found that 66% of its 2004 and 2005 graduating classes that reported working full-time were doing so in Maine. A similar study by the Finance Authority of Maine and USM, which polled 1,700 Maine high school graduates from the late 1990s, found that 55% of those students that left the state for college returned to live and work.

That's the silver lining. The cloud is that the FAME/USM study defined approximately one-third of the respondents as the "best and brightest" — a definition based on high school grades and the education of the respondents' parents. While about half of these "best and brightest" stayed in Maine for college, more than two-thirds — 69% — chose to live and work outside Maine after receiving a diploma. That's a brain drain.

The education factor
Young adults can be an elusive demographic. They are the most mobile segment of the population and are often susceptible to the lure of the big city, or maybe just the idea of leaving the nest. Maine has long been a net exporter of college-bound students, Colgan says, and in a study of Aroostook County's youth, completed in 2004, Colgan found that recent high school graduates were the most likely to leave the county for points south.

On the other hand, Colgan says, a trend exists for people to live and work within 100 miles of where they went to college. "If we want to capture them" to live and work here, Colgan says, "we have to capture them when they get to college."

That means increasing funding for higher education in the state and enticing more out-of-state students to come to Maine for college. The University of Maine System could begin by not charging out-of-state students three times more for tuition than in-state students, Colgan says. "We're critically short of people, and all our policies in terms of cost scream, 'Get away!'" Colgan observes.

But in recent years, the state has begun pumping more money into higher education. Current recommended funding for 2009 is about $268 million, a nearly 10% jump from the current school year's budget, says Catherine Reilly, Maine's state economist. "[Funding for higher education] simply can't take a back seat to other needs indefinitely," says Reilly. "We have to put our money where our mouth is when talking about how to provide more opportunities for Maine people and strengthening our economy."

The importance of higher education has not been lost on the state's private and public educational institutions. The Maine Community College System has seen its enrollment increase 48% since the Legislature reorganized the former technical colleges with a new mission four years ago. The University of New England last November announced it would launch a new college of pharmacy in Portland; Bangor's Husson College has expanded its program mix; and the University of Maine in January said it would create a School of Policy and International Affairs, all to improve options for students.

Coming home
But improving higher educational opportunities and enticing more students to go to college is only half the battle. What happens when students like Angelique Carson, the USM English major, graduate?

When talking about retaining young, educated workers, it's easy to lose sight of the individual. There are the oft-cited reasons young people leave the state: a lack of career opportunities, higher pay and better benefits elsewhere, a lack of cultural and social activities. But some young people just want to try something new, live somewhere more exotic, or pursue a career unavailable in Maine. No number of state initiatives or policies will ever stop those youth from leaving in search of new experiences and opportunities.

In fact, everyone interviewed for this story encouraged recent college graduates to leave the state, whether to receive a higher return for their educational investment or to broaden their experiences. "Should we really try to convince people to stay here after college?" asks Shannon Haines, one of the founders of Kennebec Valley Connect. "I think a lot of us feel going away, getting job experience and then realizing you want to go home is as valuable as just staying here immediately after college."

Windham native Matthew Small came back. After graduating in 2002 from the University of Maine and spending a few years in New York City, working at an off-Broadway theater, Small enrolled in graduate school at UMaine. "After the initial glitter [of the city] wore off, I realized that I missed seeing the stars at night — the ones in the sky, not on the sidewalk," Small says. "Only in leaving Maine did I realize how much I loved the state."

The lure of Maine isn't equal in every part of the state, however. Sam Burton, vice president of sales and customer service at Universal Tax Systems, a Caribou software firm formerly known as ATX, certainly feels the impact of the brain drain afflicting Aroostook County, but says it's cyclical. Sometimes the company has plenty of interest for its entry level positions among recent graduates of Northern Maine Community College or University of Maine at Presque Isle. But other times, he says, "that particular graduating class gets out and is looking to go somewhere warmer."

The company, which employs as many as 350 during tax season, has particular difficulty when it comes to hiring more seasoned employees. In that case, the company has no choice but to recruit from out of state. "As someone who loves northern Maine, it's hard to entice people to come here unless they want to come back because of a simpler lifestyle," says Burton, who was recruited from Kentucky by UTS in 2003. But it is possible for the company to find skilled workers in the area, he adds. "[Brain drain] really does exist," Burton says, "but it's not like the people who stayed behind are lower quality."

Youth gap?
After a few quiet years and a bit of a reorganization, Realize!Maine has some new legs and is ready to launch several new initiatives. The goal is to make the state as attractive as possible, and to market that fact to young adults, age 25-34.

Last year, the organization, which is now under the umbrella of the Maine Development Foundation in Augusta, received $150,000 in startup funding from Bangor Savings Bank, money that will be spent over the next three years. A statewide advisory committee was formed last August, which is developing a long-range action plan. The group is starting a pilot internship program in Bangor this summer for Husson students, with the goal of showing students that there are opportunities in the state, and to connect them with the business community.

Besides the internships, Realize!Maine wants to connect the concept of a career in Maine with the other things the state has to offer. So the interns will tackle whitewater rafting on the weekend and rub elbows with business leaders and lawmakers at weekday events scheduled by Realize!Maine, according to Kevin Thurston, the initiative's program director at MDF. They also plan to do targeted mailings to seniors at UMaine, as well as at Colby, Bates and Bowdoin Colleges, this fall; when more money becomes available, the program plans to reach out to alumni outside the state. (Currently, a bill, LD 750, is in front of the Legislature seeking $100,000 in matching support from the state.)

Bangor Savings Bank's interest in funding the program stems from its belief that its future is inextricably tied to the future workforce of the state, Breen says. "From our perspective, if you train a good work force and they all leave, you're not going to get ahead very fast," says Breen, who prefers to call the issue a "youth gap" rather than a brain drain. "There's never been a sustained growing economy that did not have a growing young workforce to support that economy. So it is a huge workforce development issue."