New Hampshire’s business leaders are worried.
The state’s population is aging and college grads aren’t sticking around to find work here.
The concern is that the lack of new blood will cause the state’s economy to lose its vitality.
To help find an answer, the University of New Hampshire has joined up with businesses to find a way to convince college students to start their professional lives here.
NHPR Correspondent Ellen Grimm has the story.
Bus sounds: students chatting.
Cookson: We're waiting for a few more students from Keene. We're thinking they probably stopped off for lattes. But thank you all for coming.
That’s Matt Cookson, Associate Vice Chancellor of the state's university system.
He joined marketing students from colleges across the state on a bus tour of Manchester.
Their assignment?
Find a way to sell the state to college students who typically leave in droves after graduating,
Cookson: If we're going to try and market the state of New Hampshire to college students, why not use college students to help develop those messages, because they're so close to it?
According to a recent survey, only 34 percent of graduates with four-year degrees stay in state.
Add in other types of degrees and that number goes up to about 53 percent.
The survey found that one of the top reasons graduates leave is the perception that jobs are elsewhere.
Dustin Siggins goes to Plymouth State University.
Siggins: My longer career will take me out of the state, but I have nothing against New Hampshire. It's a small place, it's nice, it's clean, it's healthy living and everything else. But my goals will diverge from New Hampshire, eventually.
Long-time Manchester booster, native and developer Skip Ashooh gave the tour.
Ashooh: Right over here by this power plant, right behind you you'll be able to see the last maybe 100 feet of the canals of the historic Manchester millyard. At its height, the Manchester millyard ran about around 11,000 looms.
The mills closed during the Depression and sat abandoned until new zoning allowed for multiple uses.
Ashooh: The millyard, now, because of that zoning change is about 95 percent full. As a matter of fact, the biggest problem is parking.
Other highlights along the way: The Verizon Wireless Arena.
It’s helped attract new businesses downtown, and a new luxury condo building.
The city's more run down neighborhoods were for the most part left off the tour.
UNH student Matt Evans was impressed with what he saw.
Evans: I was very unfamiliar with how many local establishments there are. There's a nice little mix of what seemed to be your family-run, family-owned businesses, as well as some corporate chains that give it that look of a city.
Scott Ricci, a UNH senior from Stoughton, Mass., had never been to Manchester.
But he wasn’t sold.
Ricci: I think it needs work. Too many mill buildings. They need to, what's the word, get with the times. The Verizon Center is a perfect example of what they've got to do with the rest of Manchester, but it takes time.
During lunch in the PSNH millyard building, the students met some young professionals with their impressive busines cards.
Brady Sadler moved to Manchester 4 years ago.
Sadler: Right now I think I'm pretty lucky. I've found a cool company that's based here but does work outside. That allows me to live here and make Manchester my home but not feel like I'm boxed in.
Maybe it all comes down to that elusive word -- "cool."
Is Manchester -- the state's largest city -- a cool place to live?
Stephanie McLaughlin calls herself a boomerang.
She grew up in Manchester, lived in Boston for about 12 years, and then came back
Stephanie: While I was away, the renaissance began, and I firmly believe we're still amidst it. It continues. So Manchester has become an interesting place to lie, a cool place to live, and I do believe an affordable place to live.
McLaughlin said she's been able to start her own marketing business and buy her own home in town. –
Both, she says, would have been financially impossible in Boston.
At the end of the event, Plymouth State University’s Dustin Siggins was taking some advice from UNH’s Matt Cookson on how best to market the state to his peers.
Cookson: You remember the drug advertising? This is your brain on drugs. And the latest one: This is how you act on Heroin.....That one gets you. Siggins: Local media? Obviously local media is huge in New Hampshire. There's three in my town alone. Have you thought about marketing, have these businesses thought about marketing to local papers?
The students are expected to present their marketing plans at the end of this semester.
For NHPR News in Manchester, I'm Ellen Grimm
