College Tuition and How to Get Young Iowans to Stay in Iowa

State 29 wrote this week about an article by David Yepsen concerning the increased enrollment at Iowa's colleges and univeristies. State 29 ended the post with this...

You want Iowa kids to attend school here and stay in Iowa? Get them into degrees that will keep them in Iowa: nursing, teaching, computer programming, agriculture, business, health care, engineering, and considering how many fatties are in Iowa I think a few more exercise science grads are in order.

State 29 fails to see the big picture. It takes more than just getting young people in college for them to stay in Iowa. Yepsen's article shows that they are going to college. However, young people decide if they want to stay in Iowa when they graduate from college and today our young people are finding themselves graduating with a ton of debt from student loans from tuition nearly doubling since 2000.

Let's say a young Iowan graduates with a degree in education and has $50,000 of debt from student loans. Will that person decide to get a job in Iowa and make $30,000 a year or will they go to Texas and make over $40,000. How about a nurse who graduates with $50,000 of student loan debt. They can choose to stay in Iowa and make $30,000 a year or go to Minneapolis or Kansas City and make $45,000. A pharmacy graduate with student loan debt can stay in Iowa and make $90,000 or head elsewhere and earn well over $100,000.

These people may like Iowa, but that extra money sure would help pay off the amount of student loan debt they have accumalated. What choice would you make?