Listen to what these post graduate students want - for those who are moving a city like NYC or Boston they are probably enjoying not having urban sprawl, fun downtown areas, available housing, easy and accessible public transportation, etc.
I totally agree with everything you’re saying and listed but let’s not pretend the biggest item is anything but “higher salary” for most. We all know that some of these major metros have companies that pay 5-10x what you’d get in a small midwestern town.
Anecdotally, I did an internship in Cleveland followed by an internship in Santa Clara (Silicon Valley). I got job offers from both and chose California. The Cleveland company was a major donor to me school, so I got hounded by the schools career development office about why I chose to go to Santa Clara instead. They asked what the company could do to be more attractive to me - they mentioned intern ice cream parties, and Friday hours worked, and mentor programs, etc. The intern pay was $18/hr vs $80/hr, and when I brought it up, that was not a good answer - they wanted something cheaper easier and more superficial to change.
My point is that NYC and Boston have nothing to worry about, and nothing will change.
there's a lot of places in between "random midwestern town" and NYC that handily beat both on wages to COL ratio. even just looking at other major east coast cities like DC, atlanta, or boston, NYC is far more expensive and typical engineer pay is only a little higher.
And the world yell the same thing to USA. Canada, Italy, and England etc. all subsides their world-class universities with public funding. Where do the students go after graduation? US.
People who live in Michigan might hope that their children can access a good education.
I can see this working in Canada (or other states that want a boost in educated citizens). Subsidize education via forgivable loans, then forgive the loans if you work in-state. The main issue I see is that the US has a terrible history with loan forgiveness. You always hear stories of (eg) teachers who should get their loan forgiven being rejected for some paperwork issue or simply bank fraud.
Taxes are much like indentured servitude. We allow the government to do things that we wouldn't allow private entities to do.
> Or loans?
Loans for specified amounts are legal, subject to some fairly strict protections (limits on APR, discharging them in bankruptcy, lots of required disclosure). You can't generally write a profit-sharing agreement that way - how would you tell the person how much they're going to have to repay? How would you stop them declaring bankruptcy immediately to get out of it?
Decrease taxes, encourage entrepreneurship and VC funding, and Canadian salaries will rise while cost of living will come down.
The customer was the in-state parent. Rest assured, they were taxed just fine.
The child, when it finishes college, should do whatever is best for the child.
If the kids are leaving the state, the problem is the state isn't attractive to the next generation. Not that the kid somehow skipped out on the state. Heck, the state had an inertial advantage over every other state and still couldn't keep the kid there.
Source: I grew up in Pennsylvania. Love the place. Left for greener pastures. Don't owe them anything out of my paychecks today. But my parents kicked into their coffers for decades and still do.
I think you're mixing an opinion on high taxation in general (which you might be right about), versus how big metropolises enjoy labor that was raised somewhere else.
Isn't the company that's hiring the graduate just as much a beneficiary for instance?
What does matter? My taxes, as parent. I pay soooo much taxes and I will continue to do so. As a result my kid is essentially forced to go to a college in state. And he will then FOR SURE move out of state. But I won’t.
So. It’s a cost to me. Like we are considering moving back to CA to get the UC discount. I will pay more in taxes but I’ll get a chunk of it back in tuition break.
"Go to State" is a recommendation from the elders. If the parents poo-poo State the kid won't consider it seriously.
But RTO is still contentious, and the ability to find a job if I moved to vaguely-near-Boise would be terrible. One misstep at work, or even just another economic shift, and I'm moving again.
But I'd love to be in a smaller city. Annapolis MD, or coastal WA or deep mountains MT, whatever.
And I know several parents who tried the "go it alone" method for a while, but eventually decided to move back to one of their hometowns, specifically to be closer to their parents for reasons related to their kids. Most of it seems to be a mix of wanting nearby, reliable childcare, as well as just wanting their kids to grow up with regular contact with their grandparents. (I've also seen the phenomenon where the grandparents, after retirement, end up moving to the parents' location, but often that requires the grandparents to move to a higher cost-of-living area, so I expect that happens less often.)
I don't plan to have kids, so this is certainly a grain-of-salt-worthy opinion, but it feels to me that parent-marriages would be on average healthier if the parents had easier childcare options so they can more often do "date night" type things. Certainly nearby grandparents is not the only way to achieve that, but it is one of the simplest options, assuming grandparents who are happy to be involved to that degree.
First, the states with the big cities they moved to also have smaller towns outside those cities that are fine for families. They can move to one of those and still have sufficient contact with the city to maintain their career.
Second, their spouse likely is not from the same state they are from, and may not want to move to that state. And they may not want to move to where the spouse is from.
A possibility is a great affordability ratio - cheap housing as compared to the prevailing local wage.
Remember, inertia to stay where you you are from is strong, you just have to help it along
WV ain't got that tho -- Pitt is at least a real city, and it's mostly filling in after the collapse of industry.
If you don't, you will only concentrate all kinds of problems on your largest cities, and even invent some wild new problem because cities can not survive all by themselves.
That said, a tax based on what city you happened to be born or identify with is the kind of weirdness that my culture can't assimilate. But it may make complete sense there (maybe because it's more traditionalist? do they want to be that traditionalist?).
There's no need to build another New York City when we already have New York City. It would be folly for the federal government to stand up a competitor to New York City.
But! It's not folly for Illinois or California to try. Competition is good.
they're not that bad, but they're not everyone's cup of tea.
But I really didn't like the culture, the roads, the housing, the way people drove. I'm just not suited for east coast life.
These cities aren’t competing on crowded, dirty public transit. They’re not prioritizing “walkability” (i.e walking through human feces and crowds of homeless people). I could definitely see the population of say, the combined TX metros overtaking NYC. Heck FL recently surpassed the population of New York state for the first time in history, not many seemed to notice. They’re not competing, they’re winning.
Neither the state collectively, non-parent residents of the state, nor the in-state parents get any future economic reward for funding higher education if the student leaves the state, so reducing the state's costs in that regard seems rational.
But that reduction in funding was part of the rise of the student loan industry, which subsequently seems to have completely deranged higher education funding.
A longer answer is that I suspect it's a bad idea in the long term. For one thing, I don't see how you wouldn't have "students who are disadvantaged for being born in the wrong state".
That seems to presuppose that the students don't benefit from the education and/or there's no interstate commerce.
I'll admit neglecting interstate commerce as a second order effect.
Part of the problem is that brain drain is a vicious cycle. Your home state is less attractive in part because of all the people in your field who left for "greener pastures".
And they have less funds to put into projects that might make the area more attractive, because they can't tax the people who left.
I'm not saying you owe anything out of your paycheck, but it is a problem. Both for the places being left and the overcrowded cities people are leaving to.
Seattle is busy complaining about all those tech jobs, and how unfair it is that they make lots of money.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/the-splitting-of-s...
Either way, the complains are pretty irrational. I live in San Francisco, where all the property owners are thrilled that their home value has surged in the past couple decades. Take away all the tech jobs, and see what happens to those home values... Can't have your cake and eat it too.
College tuition is free, you're required to live and work in NY State for the same number of years that you accepted the state funding for after graduation. If you don't do that, the scholarship/grant becomes a loan.
Why are people willing to pay more to get you to move to those areas? It just seems really weird, like there’s some man behind the curtain pulling strings to concentrate people in the above metro areas
The pandemic & work-from-home made people realize that these hubs aren't really as crucial to business success as people thought they were, but there's still a lot of institutional inertia (not to mention shitty companies requiring employees to return to office for no real reason aside from managerial power trips).
For the same reason that Detroit was the technical hub 100 years ago.
Smart people congregating leads to more smart people congregating.
America has a 40x gap between its smallest and largest state. Leaving Wyoming is the same as leaving SF for San Jose in population terms.
> Educating children is incredibly expensive. The regions are quite annoyed that they pay to educate their children but that Tokyo reaps all the benefits. This state of affairs has continued for decades.
We see the same problem in USA states. State taxpayer dollars pay for some amount of public college education for state universities. These are typically called "State Appropriations", and varies between 30-80% of the student's overall tuition costs.
Back in the 1980's, taxpayers footed most college tuition using state appropriations, so college was "cheap" for students back then. Now (2023), (at least in my state, Michigan), state appropriations typically cover 20-40% of a college student's tuition.
There is concern with this though, because of what is called "brain drain". Citizens spend all these taxpayer dollars educating youth at colleges, then the graduates from U of M, etc all move out of state to California, Boston, Seattle, etc for big tech jobs.
Then the state of Michigan doesn't see any more tax dollars from those students. Which begs the question, why pay tax dollars for higher education if those who benefit from that education do not contribute back?