Since this will be one of the last columns I write for The Reflector, I wanted to cover a topic I have thought a lot about for a couple of years now.
I believe it was in January of 2017 when I was sitting in a meeting with state officials and other Mississippi State University students at the capitol building in Jackson when I first heard a major official mention of the topic.
A gentleman spoke for a few minutes about how he and other state leaders were alarmed with the number of recent college graduates from Mississippi universities who left the state after graduation. As I said, I had been thinking about this for a while, since I already knew many students choose to leave the state post-graduation. As I am now joining this group of graduates set to depart from Mississippi, I wanted to offer some of my thoughts on how this trend might be reversed. 
The claim of Mississippi losing its college graduates is not spurious. Data does back up the idea. According to Gabriel Austin with Mississippi Today, between the years of 2010 and 2016, Mississippi’s millennial population decreased by 3.9 percent. This brought the total number of millennials in the state down to roughly 801,799.
Although this may not seem like a drastic drop, it was actually one of the greatest decreases among all the states in the category. Even if not all of these people are college graduates, it is likely many possess a university degree.
Nikki Graf of the Pew Research Center explains how around 40 percent of millennial workers possessed at least a bachelor’s degree, which equated to a higher percentage than any other generational group. 
There are a few ways I think Mississippi could improve its current predicament. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is Mississippi’s lack of attractiveness, especially when compared to other states. I know this is not the most groundbreaking observation, but let me provide more statistics to back up the claim. 
According to a CDC report which came out in January, Mississippi had the highest infant mortality rate of any state in America from 2013-2015. The official numbers were 9.08 deaths per every 1,000 live births. For comparison, the U.S. average was 5.89. This problem is due to a variety of factors, including the lack of rural health care options for many people living in rural towns across the state.
Combining this fact with young peoples’ affinity for living in more urban or metropolitan areas, moving to bigger cities seem a good idea for some. Unfortunately, big cities are not in a great supply in Mississippi.
So, what are our state leaders to do? First and foremost, we can no longer simply rely on our low-living costs as a reason for people to live here. The actions have to be more aggressive than this one metric. 
A good model to think about how state and local leaders could turn this trend around lies in the story of Pittsburgh. In his piece, Alan Greenblatt of Governing Magazine lays out how Pittsburgh managed to turn its story from one of demise, to one of prosperity. 
Around 30 or so years ago, Pittsburgh was suffering from high unemployment and a falling population. People simply did not want to live in the steel city. However, in the subsequent decades, they started moving public resources and tackling problems which made their city a more attractive place for people to live. The city pushed their university and hospital systems, which resulted in a greater number of highly-educated individuals wanting to live in Pittsburgh. 
This move also spurred innovation across many sectors of their economy. City leaders also made strides in getting more children access to pre-K education, and they invested in public goods like improved parks and sewer systems.
Finally, city officials made substantial efforts to make their government more efficient, and mandated more openness and transparency across the government as well. Basically, Pittsburgh took steps to make sure they can retain people with higher education, where they can enjoy an environmentally friendly city with access to top-notch health care and improved education options for their kids. Not too shabby. 
I know I am cheating a little bit by comparing a city to a state, but the lessons are still clear. If the leaders of this state want young people to stay or move here, they have to work on creating a place where we will actually want to live and work.
It would be wonderful if southern hospitality and low living costs were all it took, but this is not looking to be the case. Right now, people are leaving the state because there is nothing here to make them stay. State and local leaders need to be aggressive in turning this trend around, or Mississippi will continue to suffer for it.