Keeping More Students in Pittsburgh

The Pittsburgh region’s population challenges are not news, nor are the many efforts that so many government, civic and marketing organizations have put forth to solve these challenges. We’ve lost market position, political clout, tax base and more, as a direct result of not solving these issues.

This is complex work, requiring collaborations, investments, consensus, ingenuity, a competitive spirit, sustainability and more, so one can see why the challenges persist. But so must we. In fact, we are at a moment in time where we need to double-down on those efforts.

One area of high opportunity is the more than 130,000 students on the region’s college campuses. We know that half of these students leave the region when they graduate, even though many more would love to stay and build careers and a life, start businesses and contribute to a thriving region. Further, more than 12,000 of our students are here on temporary F-1 student visas and nearly 90 percent of them leave after graduating, even though many more would like to stay in the U.S.

Employers from other markets, including Seattle, Boston, Austin and San Francisco, regularly recruit from this rich pool of available talent, especially the internationals.

I’ve spent a good deal of time working directly on this challenge over the past seven years at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, and now at the Pittsburgh Tomorrow project, and I have some observations:

The more they see, the more these students fall in love with Pittsburgh and the U.S. They rave about how green it is, how friendly and kind people can be, and what a hotbed of incredible ideas, neighborhoods, people and opportunity we have here.
But they have choices, and they have to make them in a short period of time.

Why don’t we consider recruiting, hiring and integrating more of these students into the region’s workforce and communities, and in the process, erode our population decline and talent shortages, build up our entrepreneurial community, and diversify our region as a source of growth, and a way to thrive into the future? Good question. Early talent hiring has its limits in some company plans and budgets.

As for international talent, it may be that it seems complicated or requires too much change for companies to consider. But how do we intend to turn around our population challenges if we continue to let, not just these 12,000 international students, but a significant percentage of the other 120,000 American students, pursue opportunity somewhere else? How do we expect to compete and thrive without expanding our worldview of what’s possible?

The stakes keep getting higher, especially in high demand fields that many of these students are drawn to and where we tend to find the cutting edge such as in AI, machine learning, robotics, data science, life sciences and more. These technologies are the underlying forces of advancement and growth in key sectors and new business formations critical to our regional economy. Immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start a business than people born in the U.S., according to a study by the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Pittsburgh Tomorrow and numerous regional partners are encouraging our region’s C-suites to open up company cultures, recruiting and hiring processes and onboarding, in order to broaden our global awareness and competitive opportunities. Some companies here are already leading the way, including BNY and Duolingo. We urge more to get on board.

On October 23, we’re hosting leading HR and Talent professionals for Go Global —a workshop providing best practices in recruiting, hiring and onboarding international talent for area companies. They’ll hear directly from panels of colleges, companies and legal experts actively working to retain more of this top talent. 

Time is running short. Another group of 130,000+ students will descend on southwestern Pennsylvania this fall. Let’s get ahead of this opportunity. We can’t let another year go by while other regions erode our market advantage.