Crain’s this week also had an article about UIUC’s attempts to become “the top” public university in the US–a difficult feat in an era of steeply declining state subsidies (although a winning basketball team might help). Somehow, this led me to looking up the exact numbers on the hearsay that Illinois and New Jersey — two densely populated states with below-top-flight state universities — are the top “exporters” of college students.

Luckily, the higher education industry has a surfeit of social scientists tracking it; the National Information Center for Higher Education Policymaking and Analysis not only had exactly the numbers I was looking for, but detailed crosstabs and graphs of state-to-state migration by age bracket (20-somethings, adults) and education level, and a tasteful color scheme, natch.

In numerical terms, New Jersey and Illinois are the top exporters of college students, sending a net of 24,246 and 11,762 students out of state. Relative to the state’s population, only outliers Alaska and Hawai’i (with young, comparatively underdeveloped higher education offerings and literally a vast new world on the mainland to compete with) fare so poorly.

In the grander scheme of things, the bigger question is about the flow of human capital through the education pipeline. Both Iowa and Massachusetts do a comparably good job at educating their children: 28% of their ninth-graders go on to finish college (within six years), the top rank in a country where only 18% do. However, where Massachusetts benefits from other states’ investment in primary education — fully 38.8% of its adult residents have a college degree–Iowa is one of those underwriting other states’ dynamic, post-industrial economies, with 25% of its adult residents holding college diplomas (lower than the 26.7% national average).

A look at overall migration by state bears out the Bill Frey/Bruce Katz division of states into Melting Pot, Sunbelt, and Heartland. Sunbelt states in the South are gaining tens of thousands of residents, but primarily at lower educational tiers. States with strong post-industrial economies (the Pacific states, the Northeast) attract the young and college educated but not really those with less education — in some cases, like California, the less educated are moving away. And, in many cases, even those college graduates leave as older adults.

Meanwhile, the states of the Great Plains and northern Mountain West are leaking residents, especially college graduates. The industrial Midwest is faring better, but Ohio lost a net of 12,000 young people (age 22 to 29 in 2000) with college educations left between 1995 and 2000, along with nearly 4,000 adults (age 30 to 64 in 2000) with graduate degrees. The numbers are equally discouraging for Pennsylvania: 32,000 young degree-holders.