August 6, 2026
As skilled talent becomes increasingly important for economic growth and high-quality jobs, more and more states have adopted policies aiming to increase the share of their residents with postsecondary credentials. Yet states achieve skilled workforces in different ways. Some produce most of their talented workers by getting their own high school graduates through college and on to promising in-state jobs. Others rely more heavily on attracting students to their universities and then retaining them for employment. Still others bring in workers based on high availability of jobs and good quality of life. These migration patterns from high school to postsecondary education to jobs shape state economies and workforces, but they are little understood, even though policy depends heavily on them.
In a new report released by the Strada Education Foundation’s Institute for the Future of Work, Institute Senior Economist and Deputy Director of Research Brad Hershbein and coauthors use new data to analyze cross-state migration pathways between high school, college, and the workforce for Americans of working age, examining how these patterns differ across states, the type of higher education attended, field of study, and type of occupation.
Some of the findings are striking:
- More than two-thirds of college-educated workers live in the state where they attended high school, but this share varies from as high as 81% in Michigan to as low as 44% for Colorado.
- One-quarter of college-educated talent live and work in a state in which they attended neither high school nor college.
- Workers who majored in quantitative fields, as well as arts and humanities, are more likely to be working outside the state in which they were educated than those who majored in education or business.
- States also vary greatly in how well they retain the students they educate: Texas, for example, keeps 84 percent of the college graduates it produces, while Arizona retains only 41 percent of its graduates.
- Public colleges and universities help anchor in-state talent, with three-quarters of broad-access institution graduates staying to work in the state where they attended high school.
The report provides many other insights for policymakers—and employers, students, and interested residents—to understand how to better grow their talent pipelines, and the factors that are most important in workers’ decisions to move.
The full report can be found on Strada’s website: strada.org/TalentInMotion
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