[noteworthy]
North Dakota has a problem: a serious brain, brawn, and creativity drain. North Dakota suffers the highest net outmigration of 18-to25-year-olds than any other state in the nation. The statistics are sobering. In both 2009 and 2010, North Dakota ranked second on Forbes “Worst States for Keeping College Graduates” list. According to the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, for each one hundred graduates with bachelor’s degrees produced annually in North Dakota, 71 of them will leave the state. Only 37 bachelor’s degree holders (ages 22-64) will enter, resulting in a net loss of 34. The loss of so many vibrant citizens carries incalculable costs, and the reasons for their departure may be rooted in the very traits North Dakotans hold most dear. State historian Elwyn Robinson described them in his seminal book, History of North Dakota, as “courage, optimism, energy,
warmhearted individualism
and
neighborliness, self-reliance.”
Theodore Roosevelt would have agreed. The people he met here were suffused with those qualities—they are what caused him to fall in love with North Dakota, and today they play a role in driving young people away. 28
