Born on the Bayou, Staying on the Bayou

Baton Rouge retains most of its young adults. What makes them different from young professionals?

Last week the US Census Bureau, in partnership with Opportunity Insights and Policy Impacts, released a new online tool tracking young adult migration patterns. The tool, available at migrationpatterns.org¹, gives a fresh look at where young adults across the US are moving.

The mapping tool uses federal tax data and American Community Survey estimates to determine how far young people born between 1984 and 1992 strayed from home. It tracks where someone lived at age 16 and compares that to where they lived at age 26. It’s important to point out – in this brief, we use the term young adults to describe the migration trends for these 16 / 26-year-olds. The Baton Rouge Area Chamber is working to retain young professionals which we define as labor force participants between ages 25 and 44. These two groups are different and, as we’ll see, our metro does a better job retaining young adults compared to young professionals.

While this brief discusses young adult migration patterns, we believe these findings have important implications for how we approach better retaining our young professional population.

Four out of five young adults born in the Capital Region stay here

79% of young adults who lived in the Baton Rouge metro at age 16 were still here at age 26. This figure shows that our young adults stayed here in high numbers, especially when compared against peer metros:

While the Baton Rouge metro does a good job retaining young adults, we don’t do as well when it comes to retaining young professionals: the Capital Region experienced net negative migration of young professionals in six of the seven years from 2013 through 2019.

Keeping young adults here is important for filling jobs in our tight labor market, but it’s also critical we keep a greater share of our young professionals. Young adults entering the labor force require greater amounts of training compared to their more-experienced young professional counterparts. There’s research² that suggests our peak productivity years fall between ages 30 and 40, further emphasizing the importance of retaining more of our metro’s young professionals.

Young adults age into young professionals, and we now know that nearly 80% of Baton Rouge’s soon-to-be-graduating high school students were still here in their mid-20s. Keeping them here past their mid-20s, however, is where our metro has some room for improvement. Expanding and strengthening the personal and professional networks of our region’s young adults can help keep them here longer into their young professional years, and that’s why BRAC recently teamed up with Forum 225, Baton Rouge’s largest young professionals organization. This partnership encourages business owners to sign their young adult and young professional employees up for a Forum 225 membership. The goal is to grow the social networks of Baton Rouge’s young professionals to help them deepen roots in the community, ultimately better retaining these individuals.

1. US Census Bureau, Policy Impacts, Opportunity Insights

2. National Institutes of Health - National Center for Biotechnology Information