Louisiana is a net exporter of young, college-educated men and women who leave the state for career opportunities elsewhere. This pattern is sometimes referred to as the “brain drain.” The phrase itself has been around for decades, as has the problem of losing talented minds to other, nearby states.
What’s different now: this brain drain is getting worse. Just ask a leading researcher on the topic, University of Louisiana at Lafayette economics professor Gary Wagner. His oft-cited studies reveal the full extent of this brain drain. During an interview broadcast September 8 on Louisiana Public Broadcasting [11:07-17:20], he explained “Louisiana is not doing very well these days when it comes to college educated people. If you go back to 2000, which is the longest period in time that we have data, in the last 21 years we've lost about 110,000 college educated people, on net.”
It is not just the better career opportunities out-of-state which are pulling these young college-educated people away. Many parents and grandparents eventually follow their children or grandchildren out-of-state after they retire. Ernie Roberson spent 29 years as the Caddo Parish Registrar of Voters. Since his retirement in 2019 Roberson has been a self-described amateur historian.
Roberson says he has seen this pattern - of people leaving Louisiana to be with their family elsewhere - for decades now. “And that’s where they took not only themselves,” explained Roberson, they took their money, and their house payments, and their car payments, and all their business. And so, it affects the entire economy. And that’s one of the things happening now or has been happening in Shreveport, I would say really, probably since the ‘60s.”
Those family migrations out of state could help explain at least a portion of the 22,474 people who have left Shreveport since 2000, based on U.S. Census figures. That is a staggering 11-percent of the population gone in less than a quarter century. By the end of the decade, projections show Shreveport’s total population will be down to 159,500.
Much of the outward migration of people from Shreveport falls into the category of what’s called a “push factor;” in this case it is a toxic combination of poverty, unemployment, and crime that is largely blamed for pushing people away. A “pull” factor, on the other hand, includes a growing economy and good paying jobs. Professor Wagner compares Louisiana to other states. “So, we're doing worse compared to most other states, and we're doing much worse in the last five years. So, in the last five years, a lot of the metrics have really moved in a negative direction for us.” More than half of those leaving Louisiana head to Texas. Many of the rest head to neighboring southern states.
Ernie Roberson reminds us that we have been here before with a brain drain and trying to keep some of our best and brightest in Louisiana. “It’s part of life. But unfortunately, Shreveport has had it for years because our first brain drain was the fact, we didn’t have a four-year public college. And that started, it really started in the ‘60s .”
It is important to point out that LSU-Shreveport did transition to a four-year public college back in 1972. And there is one silver lining, of sorts, to this story: new research shows Louisiana ranks 17th nationally — higher than might have been expected — in attracting and keeping college graduates. That’s according to a research paper released in May 2022, and published in the National Bureau of economic Research – along with a detailed analysis by the Washington Post, which conducted the state ratings.