Young people are leaving Wisconsin and they aren’t coming back. That’s leading to employee shortages of all kinds and an empty state.
Here’s Five Fast Facts on Wisconsin’s Youth Decline:
- 📉 Exit Only - A recent report shows that Wisconsin really sucks when it comes to attracting and retaining young people. In fact, we’ve lost 106,000 people 26 and under over the past 10 years. That’s not good.
- ⏬ These people love it - What’s worse is that if this keeps up, our working age population will decline by 130,000 people by 2030. Eight years goes faster than you think.
- 🎓 Smell Ya Later, Dude - We lose more than 20% of our college grads than we retain. People are graduating, leaving the state and not coming back. Better paying jobs and bigger cities are pretty appealing.
- 👴 Guess Who? - Yep, Baby Boomers are also to blame. They’re shifting into retirement mode, leaving those jobs open with no one to replace them. Nice work, guys.
- 🤷 Clueless - No one in charge has been big-brained enough to figure out how to stop the bleeding, but ideas are being floated including tax reform and expanding school choice. Notice the words “better pay and benefits” are nowhere in that sentence.
🔥Bottom line: Advertising isn’t going to stop the problem. It’s going to take cultural adjustments and real change to keep people here. This situation also demonstrates how our leaders are out-of-touch with reality when their solutions are just kind of made up with a shrug. A solution needs to be found, and fast, our we’re in a lot of trouble.
How can we retain young people? (Note: “Let ‘em leave, they’re spoiled” isn’t the solution.)
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