Reports of Wisconsin’s Brain Drain Are Greatly Exaggerated: The State’s Real Talent Problem Is Who Doesn’t Come

Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri

Executive Summary

Wisconsin’s college-educated residents do not leave at unusually high rates. The deeper weakness is on the other side of the ledger: relatively few educated newcomers arrive, especially from far away and among people born in other states. At the median state’s arrival rate, Wisconsin would receive about 7,600 more college-educated arrivals a year. Most of that gap reflects Wisconsin’s generally low rate of interstate circulation. Given its low departure rate, the national relationship predicts only about 1,500 more arrivals a year than Wisconsin actually receives.

The widely cited recent “brain drain” ranking measures something different. Among adults aged 31 to 40, 59.8 percent of Wisconsin-born people living elsewhere hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 45.2 percent of people born in other states who live here, a 14.6-point gap that ranks second among the 50 states. Among the same birthplace-defined groups, Wisconsin has more college-educated natives living in other states than college-educated adults born in other states living here, as do most states. Counting those people puts Wisconsin 31st of 50. The second-place ranking is a comparison of educational composition, not a ranking of current net migration.

Recent migration flows are much less dramatic. From 2021 to 2024, Wisconsin’s net migration rate for college-educated adults aged 25 to 44 was essentially zero, ranking 25th among the 50 states. Its arrival rate was the 10th lowest in the country; its departure rate was the fifth lowest. Wisconsin did lose college graduates on net through much of the 2010s, roughly 3,700 to 4,200 a year at mid-decade, but recent flows are approximately balanced.