3/26/2001
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Is There a “Brain Drain” Taking Place in Montana?
Just as the Bush administration has found it politically convenient to describe the national economy as in a state of collapse in order to try to sell its huge tax cut, it has also become popular to bad-mouth the Montana economy in order to promote particular political agendas. Judging by the stream of catastrophic rhetoric that has come from political and industrial leaders who are pursuing their pet legislative changes, it is hard to believe that there is anyone left in the state. Apparently poverty afflicts us all; our economy has been shutting down for ten or twenty years or more; and there are no decent jobs left. So who is left to listen to these tales of economic woe? The economically rational among us must have already fled and those few who remain must be so stupid and irrational that they ignore economic reality altogether.
One of the more recent tales of economic woe focuses on what we are told is the forced out-migration of our well-educated young people. If one looks at the data on people moving into and out of Montana over the last decade by age class, one finds that Montana, on net, is losing college-age and post-college-age young people, those aged 18 to 30.
Usually it is simply asserted that these folks left because there were not enough high-paid jobs to hold them. Given their accumulated college loans, these young people have to go somewhere paying high enough wages that they can support themselves and pay off their loans. Besides the distress at losing our young people, this trend has been interpreted to mean that Montana is suffering a “brain drain” too. This is the group most likely to have been to college and the group most likely to staff high tech industry. If we are losing all these people, how can we possibly compete in the new economy? Without the possibility of high tech jobs and with the ongoing loss of the high paid jobs in our natural resource industries, how can there possibly be a prosperous future for Montana?
Before jumping to these dire conclusions, it is worth looking at the migration patterns of the entire set of age groups. It is interesting to note that for all age categories after age 30, Montana saw net in-migration during the 1990s. It also had net in-migration for the youngest age categories, from age one through age sixteen. This tells us several important things.
First, although we lose young people who are just entering the job market, we gain more mature workers who have significant work experience. In effect, we send our young people off to get experience elsewhere in the county and then they return with that experience. Of course, not all of them return, but between 60 and 70 percent of in-migrants are folks with previous connections with Montana; they are return migrants.
It is not clear that this represents a “brain drain.” We appear to lose inexperienced or less experienced workers and gain more experienced workers. The in-migrants have significantly more education than the state’s population as a whole: 62 percent have some college as opposed to 49 percent for the state as a whole. We apparently are a net importer of the education and work-experience produced elsewhere in the country. [1] That does not sound like an overall loss.
The net in-migration of younger children and teenagers also tells a different story that the one usually heard. It is usually suggested that young families are forced to leave Montana because wages are so low here. But we have been gaining children through in-migration, not losing them. This may not appear to square with the loss of students in our elementary schools, but that loss would have been even worse if it were not for the in-migrants. We simply are having fewer children. It is that fundamental demographic fact that explains the decline in school enrollments.
What appear to be going on is that our young, largely un-married and childless young people are going off to explore the opportunities available in the rest of the world outside of Montana. That is neither surprising nor harmful. What would it say if our young people showed no curiosity about the rest of the world or lacked the initiative to go out and explore that world? In the process of that exploration, our young people also gain experience and education. Then, after they begin to form families and have kids themselves, they begin to consider where they want to raise those families and many return to Montana. Those that do not are replaced by young people born elsewhere who choose Montana as an attractive place to settle and raise a family.
It may be easier for our young people to explain their desire to move away from home by stating that choice in economic terms: Economic conditions are forcing them to leave. That may be easier than telling their parents that it is important to get away from their families of origin and establish their own lives and households. The fact is that young people tend to migrate away from areas regardless of local economic conditions. The young go a-roving and we are unlikely to be able to stop them.
We know that often the same phenomenon can be described in apparently conflicting terms: the old “glass half-empty or half-full” phenomenon. When a people, however, systematically choose the negative alternative explanation, they have begun a process that ultimately may become a self-fulfilling expectation. As we express a lack of confidence in the life choices we ourselves have made, we may be actively discouraging others, including our children, from seeing Montana as an attractive place to live, work, and raise a family. If we do not take pride in what we have and feel confidant about the cost we paid, how likely is it that others will consider this an attractive home or market.
Politically motivated bad-mouthing of the economy may not be not be just simple opportunism, it may be the beginning of a self-induced downward social spiral.
[1] We do not really know how the out-migrants and the in-migrants compare in terms of education and work experience. It is possible that the out-migrants have higher education levels than the in-migrants. We only know the age category net in- or out-migrants fall into. We know the characteristics of the in-migrants who we can interview but those who leave do not have to stop at the border and go through an exit interview. The new Census data may allow us to look at the characteristics of those who left Montana over the last 5 years in more detail, but that data will not be available for several more years.