Young people regularly leave upstate New York, and they are not being replaced by incoming young professionals. The exodus of young people and strategies to reverse this trend were discussed Dec. 2 on campus at “Youth Retention and Attraction in New York: A Research-based Approach Through Student-Community-University Engagement.”
John Sipple, associate professor in Cornell’s Department of Development Sociology, used data from Cornell’s Program on Applied Demographics to highlight the young adult demographic. “What happens when kids turn 23, 24, 25 – where are they locating?” he asked. “What’s really relevant for the conversation today is the “in-migration” and the “out-migration” of kids and adults at different ages.”
These rates are strongly affected by messages that upstate children receive growing up, said Sipple, who noted that we internalize signals from neighborhood adults as well as actual and perceived economic characteristics of communities and regions. These factors become the basis for our decision-making about where to live later on in our lives.
With respect to upstate New York, Sipple said, “the problem is not so much brain drain, or [that] people are leaving at unusually high numbers. People are leaving in regular, pretty typical, rates.” But the rate at which people move into upstate New York is “really extraordinarily low. … Upstate New York really suffers from a lack of in-migration, which signals a very different problem and a very different set of solutions.”
Heidi Mouillesseaux-Kunzman of Cornell’s Community and Regional Development Institute (CaRDI) said young people often are simply not engaged enough and are not receiving enough information about opportunities to remain upstate. Research suggests that one of the messages young people receive is that they need to leave to be successful. She reiterated the importance of delivering the right messages to youth as they mature to ensure that young people know their neighborhoods and communities have opportunities available to them and that they have an important role to play in creating additional ones.
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