Report: More than half of NH high school grads headed out of state

Still further troubling evidence of the out-migration of young people from New Hampshire is a new report that shows half the Granite State’s high school graduates will attend college out of state.

Niche Ink offered data that show that 58 percent of New Hampshire’s high school graduates will go away to college. That’s the second highest percentage in the country behind Vermont with 64 percent.

Niche describes its services as providing reviews and insight from experts on choosing a neighborhood in which to live or a college or K-12 school to attend.

The report underscores a growing problem for the Granite State: It is getting more gray as more older people move in or stay on and as younger people move away.

Note: New Hampshire is the fourth oldest state, with an average age of 41.1 (and it has the second highest rate of high school graduate out-migration). Vermont is the second oldest state at 41.5 and is the state with the highest rate of graduate out-migration. The oldest state in the country is Maine at 42.7; it ranks eighth in Niche Ink’s study with 44 percent of high school graduates leaving the state to attend college elsewhere.

A Washington Post review of the data noted in general that New England and the Mid-Atlantic have a tougher time holding onto their high-school graduates.

Said the Post analysis:
But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily undesirable places. As Niche Ink points out in its analysis, that could be due to income levels, the quality of the K-12 education students receive, college cost and quality, and how close graduates are to nearby colleges. The states in the Northeast are far smaller than the states in the South and West, so leaving is a lot easier. Students across the North of the country also tend to score highly on standardized tests, one criteria colleges use in the acceptance process. (Therefore, more high-scoring students may have more college choices and opportunity to leave.)

There are state-sanctioned efforts to try to keep young people in the Granite State, Stay Work Play New Hampshirechief among them.

Its mission statement is:
To work collaboratively across New Hampshire to support ongoing economic, workforce, and community development by promoting the state as a favorable place for young workers and recent college graduates to stay, work and play, when considering employment and lifestyle opportunities.

Are you a high school graduate who is heading out to state to go to college? Will you come back to New Hampshire to live and work? If so why, if not why not?