Reports of Wisconsin’s Brain Drain Are Greatly Exaggerated: The State’s Real Talent Problem Is Who Doesn’t Come
Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri
Executive Summary
Wisconsin’s college-educated residents do not leave at unusually high rates. The deeper weakness is on the other side of the ledger: relatively few educated newcomers arrive, especially from far away and among people born in other states. At the median state’s arrival rate, Wisconsin would receive about 7,600 more college-educated arrivals a year. Most of that gap reflects Wisconsin’s generally low rate of interstate circulation. Given its low departure rate, the national relationship predicts only about 1,500 more arrivals a year than Wisconsin actually receives.
The widely cited recent “brain drain” ranking measures something different. Among adults aged 31 to 40, 59.8 percent of Wisconsin-born people living elsewhere hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 45.2 percent of people born in other states who live here, a 14.6-point gap that ranks second among the 50 states. Among the same birthplace-defined groups, Wisconsin has more college-educated natives living in other states than college-educated adults born in other states living here, as do most states. Counting those people puts Wisconsin 31st of 50. The second-place ranking is a comparison of educational composition, not a ranking of current net migration.
Recent migration flows are much less dramatic. From 2021 to 2024, Wisconsin’s net migration rate for college-educated adults aged 25 to 44 was essentially zero, ranking 25th among the 50 states. Its arrival rate was the 10th lowest in the country; its departure rate was the fifth lowest. Wisconsin did lose college graduates on net through much of the 2010s, roughly 3,700 to 4,200 a year at mid-decade, but recent flows are approximately balanced.
The more distinctive finding is who comes. From 2021 to 2024, Wisconsin attracted college graduates from beyond 500 miles at about 62 percent of the rate implied by its share of the college-educated population, compared with 86 percent for the median state. Of those long-distance arrivals, 29.5 percent were Wisconsin-born, compared with 16.2 percent in the median state. Excluding returnees, Wisconsin’s long-distance attraction index falls to 0.52, compared with 0.83 in the median state. The same pattern appears in the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses. Wisconsin is better at attachment than attraction, and so is much of the upper Midwest.
Milwaukee is one place to look, though it does not establish why: employment in four knowledge-based sectors fell 2.9 percent there from 2010 to 2024 while rising 29.1 percent nationally. A useful test for any talent policy is whether it could change the decision of someone with little reason to choose the state.