Study Shows STL Region in Top 10 for New Grad Relocations for Third Year
Date Posted: May 8, 2019
Posted In: Discussion, Ideas, Regionalism, Workforce,
From SmartAsset: Once you’ve put in the work to get a degree, you’ve got a big decision ahead of you: Where to start your career? For those who have the ability to relocate, choosing the right city can make a big difference. Some likely considerations are the cost of living and the strength of the job market. After all, you need to save enough to help you pay off those student loans. You probably also want to live in a place with people your age and things to do. We considered all of these factors and more to create this list of the best cities for new college grads.
This is SmartAsset’s fifth annual edition of the best cities for college grads. You can read the 2018 study here.
SmartAsset created this list by looking at data for 108 of the largest cities. We looked specifically at 10 metrics across three categories: jobs, fun and affordability.
Our job score for a city includes the overall unemployment rate, the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree, average earnings for college graduates and the number of job listings on Indeed. The affordability score considers cost of living and monthly median rent costs. To measure fun, we looked at the concentration of entertainment and dining establishments, the percentage of the population between the ages of 20 and 29, the average Yelp rating for bars in the area and the average Yelp rating for restaurants in the area. You can learn more about our data sources and how we created the final ranking in the Data and Methodology section below.
Key Findings
- The Midwest beats the East and West coasts. Much like last year, our data shows that the Midwest is a better option for college grads than either of the coasts. Five of the top 10 cities and 11 of the top 25 cities are in the Midwest. Just two of the top 25 cities in our overall study are along either of the coasts. That said, the coastal states do claim nine of the top 10 cities in the metric for most available jobs based on the number of job listings.
- College grads face lower unemployment. Across the 108 cities we considered, those with a bachelor’s degree had an unemployment rate of just 2.80%. That’s well below the overall unemployment rate of 3.90% in those cities.
- California isn’t the best for college grads. Only one city in our top 25 is in California. Meanwhile, 11 of the bottom 25 cities are in the Golden State. And in those 11 Californian cities, the cost of living is about 40% higher than the national average. That high cost of living certainly won’t make it any easier to pay off your student loans.