Big issue here is lack of white collar jobs. Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Lake Charles have a very robust industrial sector - but not much in the way of corporate headquarters.

The state has relied on tax credits and other incentives to lure employers to the area, but that seems to just not be a priority anymore.

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LINK

Lucy Bui would have liked to stay close to her family and find a job in Louisiana after graduating from LSU with an architecture degree in 2022. But the professional opportunities were not in Louisiana, she said.

She quickly accepted an offer with a firm in Dallas.

“I would never grow as a professional if I stayed in Baton Rouge,” said Bui, who grew up there. “Staying home in Louisiana wouldn’t have fulfilled my ambition and desires of becoming a well-rounded person.”

The quality of life in Dallas is higher than anything Bui could find in Louisiana, she said. The city is diverse, has a significant number of events and amenities, and has many young professionals around the same age from across the country.

Bui said New Orleans has a taste of all of that, but too little to keep young people in the state.

“They can’t see a future with Louisiana. They want better job opportunities and quality of life,” Bui said.

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Louisiana’s nine largest metropolitan areas lost a net 317,500 residents from 2005 to 2020, according to further analysis of the data conducted by the Manship School News Service. New Orleans, which experienced significant population loss in the years following Hurricane Katrina, accounted for 78% of those losses.

About 178,000 residents, or 56% of the net loss, moved to Texas. Other popular destinations were Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia and Tennessee. Altogether, 85% of Louisiana’s net population loss went to other Southern states. Louisiana also lost population to the West and Midwest.

But the state’s metro areas gained nearly 8,000 residents from the Northeast.

The breakdown of migration patterns among each metro area offers other insights, according to the analysis:

· Baton Rouge, Lake Charles and Hammond bucked part of the trend, bringing in more residents than they lost.

· Excluding the New Orleans MSA, those 55 and older were the second largest age range to leave the state.

· And Lake Charles was the only city to bring in more bachelor’s degree holders than it lost.

The 2020 Census showed slow growth for the state’s population as a whole, well below the national average. Rural north Louisiana saw significant losses, and what little population growth there was in Louisiana occurred almost entirely in the southern half of the state in urban areas.

“We’ve been seeing population loss in our rural parishes. But what this shows is that we’re exporting people even from our MSA’s, which should be the locus of professional economic activity,” said Tim Slack, a demographer at LSU.

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Despite Louisiana’s outmigration patterns, national data suggests that Louisiana isn’t suffering from brain drain nearly as much as other, smaller and more rural states.

Louisiana does fairly well, in 17th place, when it comes to keeping and attracting college grads compared to other states, according to a paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research and an analysis by the Washington Post last year.

States such as New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia, for example, experience the worst brain drain in the U.S. Unsurprisingly, states with large cities – New York, California, Illinois, Texas – pull graduates from all over the country.

Not sure how to turn this tide. Texas is going to eventually be weighed down by taxes and bloat, increasing the costs of living - especially as the demographics and politics change. But Louisiana needs to not wait for that to happen. It needs to be competitive in more than just the petrochemical industry.

I think the best course of action is to shovel cash into the colleges/university systems and try to attract more research jobs. Ideally we could revamp our tax code, but until that happens more deal sweeteners from the state in the form of tax credit and job training would have to be beefed up.

This post was edited on 6/6/23 at 9:48 am