Noah Barbieri, who will soon be leaving this state to spend three years studying at Oxford University in England, is an exceptional Mississippian.
Rhodes Scholar. Truman Scholar. Student body president. Straight-A graduate of Millsaps College.
What makes Barbieri especially unusual, though, is his pledge to come back to Mississippi once he completes his education.
He wants to enter politics and help his home state address some of its problems, including the tendency of many of its best and brightest to leave once they graduate from college, many of them never to return other than for family visits.
The numbers to back up the concern over this “brain drain” are well-documented. Forty percent of the graduates from Mississippi’s eight public universities leave the state within five years. From 2010 to 2016, the exodus of millennials — those who are currently in their early 20s to mid-30s — totaled about 30,000. “That’s like losing the entire city of Tupelo,” Barbieri says.
This loss of upwardly mobile young adults is primarily why Mississippi has lost population for the last three years in a row.
The difficulty for this state is that it is demographically at odds with the population trends in the country. As the U.S. economy gets more information-driven and less dependent on growing and making things, jobs — and thus, people — gravitate to the cities.
On top of that, young people are much more inclined these days to be chasing the urban experience, rather than the rural one. The popular places to be are Nashville, Birmingham and Houston, Texas — all of which are booming. It’s tough for Mississippi — with only one city of any size — to compete with that.
This state’s brain drain has been on my mind recently as I’ve been trying to fill a couple of slots in our newsroom for reporters.
Occasionally we’ll get lucky and an experienced journalist will land in Greenwood. Kathryn Eastburn, who is spending her last week at the Commonwealth before moving to Galveston, Texas, where she has family and a job at a larger newspaper waiting for her, has been a terrific example of that.
Most times, though, I’m recruiting recent college graduates.
I’ve had worse luck generally at getting Mississippi graduates to come work at the Commonwealth than those who grew up and went to school in another state.
Sometimes the job doesn’t fit what the Mississippi grads want or doesn’t pay them as much as they think they’re worth. The journalism schools in this state have for some time now been producing students who tend to be more interested in public relations or broadcasting than they are in newspapers.
Also, there’s the issue of novelty. If you grew up in Mississippi, coming to Greenwood doesn’t seem all that adventuresome, even for those who have had little exposure to the Delta in their life.
I was interested, though, in hearing what Barbieri, who spoke to the Greenwood Rotary Club a couple of weeks ago, thinks would help cities such as Greenwood attract and keep people from his age group.
His answer was that they need to bring the “cool” factor.
Nashville, for example, where my daughter lives, is considered very cool these days. It’s got loads of good restaurants, the country music scene, professional football and hockey teams, several colleges, and tons of events. Getting a hotel room there can be ridiculous. Almost every weekend there’s something going on, and the hoteliers jack up their prices accordingly.
Greenwood is not going to be the next Nashville, but it might think about how to become a miniature version of it, or something along those lines.
The millennials are a restless generation. They want regular stimulation — probably exacerbated by growing up during the smartphone and social media explosion. If we want to get more of them to move here, we’re going to have to respond to that restlessness.
We have some of the elements already. For a town of this size, the restaurant variety and quality are well above the norm. We’ve got a great local bookstore. We put on several cool events — the 300 Oaks Road Race, for example, that’s coming up next weekend — but we may need more of them. We could really benefit from a more robust music scene.
The good news is some factors that used to be a detriment — the lack of a mall or a movie theater — are not such a handicap anymore. With online shopping and video streaming, a lot of millennials now cover both of those bases with a broadband connection and subscription to Amazon Prime.
Legislators and economic development officials like to talk about Mississippi’s tourism potential. Nothing wrong with that. But the most important group we need to focus on attracting are people doing more than passing through.
• Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
