Jennifer and David Pollock relocated to Birmingham a few weeks ago with a team of researchers to study nephrology at UAB. Photo by Cameron Gray.
When Jennifer and David Pollock left the Augusta Regents University in January and relocated to Birmingham, they did so for one big reason.
“I only came because of UAB,” Jennifer Pollock said. “The bonus was that it was in the Southeast. The bonus was Birmingham’s a very livable city – it’s not too big, it’s not too small. All of those were things that were good and that were what I considered bonus, but it wasn’t the major draw.
“The major draw was that we could be a part of this institution and that our reasons for what we wanted to do with our science and with our research fit with what the university here wanted to do.”
The Pollocks are professors of nephrology, and UAB recruited them to expand their area of research in Birmingham. In fact, UAB “made a new section of the division of nephrology that we are heading up. My husband is the director. It’s called the Cardio-Renal Physiology and Medicine section.”
But the Pollocks didn’t come alone. “We brought…nine other researchers to work with us,” Jennifer Pollock said. “When we were deciding whether to move or not, a lot of the reasons why we would move would be because the people that we worked with in our labs also would move with us, because we don’t really want to start completely over with hiring people and everything.”
The team they brought with them included Ph.D. and MD-Ph.D. students, several postdoctoral fellows and an instructor, she said. “We each have our own labs. So my husband’s lab – he brought three people, and I brought six.”
And they didn’t stop there. “Then we were able to recruit some of our other fellow faculty members to follow suit, so as a result another faculty member just signed that he’s going to be moving also and he’s going to be bringing three people with him.”
The Pollocks and their growing list of collaborators and colleagues represent a lot of intellectual firepower moving into Birmingham. As such, they also represent how UAB is helping to fight off what many have considered a threat to the economic stability of countries, states, regions and cities: the brain drain.
“If there were brain drain it would be a very detrimental thing to the long-term vitality of the region,” said Dick Marchase, vice president for research and economic development at UAB. “I think that’s one reason that we are working so hard to try to prevent that from happening.”
Common issues
A short drive from downtown Birmingham in almost any direction reveals that substantial portions of the region remain rural, open land, more country than city. And it’s not hard to find large tracts of poverty within the city and around it.
Such conditions often contribute to what social scientists and others call the brain drain – the tendency for smart people, particularly young people, to move to areas that appear more conducive to study, to intellectual pursuits such as research, and to earning a good living.
Brain drain can happen as people leave poorer or more economically depressed countries for those which are more prosperous, and it can happen within a country. A 2008 NPR report, “Midwestern States Struggle to Stem Brain Drain,” highlights that fact.
“Each year, Iowa, along with other Midwestern states, watches as many of its most highly-educated young people migrate to jobs in Texas, New York or California,” NPR’s Jason Beaubien said in his report. “Retaining college graduates has become a critical issue to moving the entire Midwest forward. Kansas, North Dakota and Nebraska have all launched initiatives to try to entice recent graduates to stay.”
It’s not just the Midwest where brain drain is a problem. A Jan. 14 story in the Miami Herald documents the issue in South Florida. “Young professionals talk about how many of their most promising high school classmates left and never returned. Many in the tech community can rattle off dozens who left South Florida to start or grow entrepreneurial businesses,” wrote reporter Nancy Dahlberg.
“Such ‘brain drain’ has been a problem for South Florida for years. Though the region ranks seventh in the nation when counting college students per capita, the Miami metro area measures poorly when it comes to residents aged 25-34 with a bachelor’s degree — just 29 percent in 2012, or the bottom quadrant among the top 50 metro areas, according to Census data. … Many young people see South Florida as a poor place to launch a business or career, even if they are from the area.”
The southern region as a whole has been pinpointed in a 2012 study showing how jobs are leaving and a weakness in areas that will attract new ones. A study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce indicates that “the South, despite having relatively strong job growth compared to the rest of the U.S., is stuck in an economic cycle called low-wage, low-skill equilibrium, when supply and demand for skilled workers lies on the lower end of the wage and education scales.”
The study goes on to say that “both educators and employers become dependent on an economic and technological pathway that suppresses wages and discourages human capital development.” A press release from Georgetown sums up the danger: “The result is a brain drain of the region as highly skilled and educated workers leave to find better jobs.”
Anthony P. Carnevale, the center’s director and study co-author, is quoted as saying that “Brain drain tends to occur when your state is not producing jobs for college-educated workers or people with a degree or technical certificates. … Generally what happens is if you produce more college-educated workers than people are looking for and the wages aren’t as high as elsewhere, the people would leave.”
His report analyzes 17 states and Washington D.C., and concludes that only D.C., Maryland and Virginia are poised to generate jobs at or above the national percentage of those projected to require higher education by 2020.
That means, if the study is correct, that Alabama as a state will create more college graduates than it has jobs that require college education.
Other researchers suggest that the problem of brain drain is faced by most of the US as recent graduates move from their home states in search of something better or something specific. Some studies suggest that rather than a net loss of intellectual firepower in the South, the region as a whole tends to benefit from the opposite trend — brain gain — as people migrate in this direction.
What about Birmingham?
As the largest employer in the state, UAB is in fact always looking for more smart people, starting with the students it recruits, Marchase said. It’s not purely an effort to stem the brain drain, but that’s the icing on the cake.
“I’m not sure it’s deliberate as much as it’s what happens when we do our jobs. We’re trying very hard to bring talented students into our university,” Marchase said.
“We’ve really stepped up our recruitment outside the area. We’re putting together programs like the bioinformatics and public health that we think are going to be attractive to students and we think will allow us to be a more attractive place to students outside the region to come to locate in Birmingham.
“We think if we can build off the strengths that we have — and the strengths are pretty broad, but many of them are centered around the medical sciences — if we can build off those strengths, really continue to bring in top level students, that many of them will in fact remain in the area,” Marchase said. “So we’re looking to bring them in for four years, and we’re hopeful that a good portion of them will stay on and continue to make Birmingham their home.”
The recruitment of high level academics doesn’t stop with the student body, he added.
“From a faculty point of view, as you know, we’ve been very aggressive in going after top talent, and that’s top talent from all over the country. … When we can go after folks like the Pollocks and they bring six, eight, 10, 12 very talented people in with them, we think that’s one of the best things we can do. We’ve been very aggressive in seeking new research talent as well as clinical talent in the last several years, both with the goals that we have, which is to increase the research portfolio and the research productivity of the university, and that as a side benefit, we know that we’re helping reverse whatever loss of talent there is as people leave the region.
“So we figure,” Marchase said, “That it’s not a conscious effort to stem the brain drain, but if we do our jobs and bring in great students and bring in great faculty members, it’s certainly going to work to add to the competencies in Alabama, and help us as a region become stronger and more dedicated to the knowledge-based economy.”
Photo by Cameron Gray.
He also cited Innovation Depot — which is a partner institution, but not part of UAB — as an important element in building the knowledge-based economy in Birmingham. “With Innovation Depot housing 95 companies now, with 500 employees, we are becoming known as a great place for start-up talent.”
The large number of tech-based start-ups in Birmingham also helps keep intellectual capital flowing into, rather than out of, the community. “That’s another huge driver here. UAB contributes to the innovative ecosphere,” Marchase said. “Many of the companies, some of the companies that get spun off are coming out of UAB with our technology, but if we can become known as a place that is great for fostering young companies, and we have success stories at Innovation Depot that really support that premise, then that’s going to be another huge factor at keeping talent here and bringing talent in from the outside.”
Waymond Jackson Jr., director of education and workforce development for the Birmingham Business Alliance, said the issue of brain drain, and UAB’s role against it, became clear to the BBA in a national magazine story published in 2011.
“Forbes magazine actually listed the Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan area as a brain magnet,” Jackson said. “And part of that reasoning was due to UAB. They were saying that because we have the University of Alabama medical center, it was focused on research, technology and the private medical industry surrounding it, that we’re able to actually draw talented people here to Birmingham. … We think part of the concern is to be able to continue to be able to feed that and continue to have that pipeline of people coming in.”
After the Forbes article, Jackson said, the BBA did research on an aspect of how well the metro area is doing at holding onto and attracting young professionals.
“Compared to other areas, the Birmingham metropolitan area was doing fairly well,” he said. “It showed that between 2007 and 2011, our YP [young professional] population increased 23 percent. That was almost twice as much as the growth rate for Alabama and for the U.S.”
The BBA figures, which are based on U.S. Census data, also show larger percentages of people with bachelor’s degrees or greater live in Jefferson and Shelby Counties. While 24 percent of the state population as a whole has a college degree, 35 percent do in Jefferson County, and 41 percent do in Shelby. The numbers in metro Birmingham match the nation as a whole, at 31 percent.
“We think there are some things going on right here in Birmingham in the metropolitan area, as it relates to being able to bring in young talent,” he said.
The BBA also refers to a Brookings Institution report which points out that Birmingham has one of the nation’s largest shares of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs that don’t require a four-year degree. “We’re seeing in certain areas that we’re able to produce the types of jobs that actually require people who come in to have either an associate’s degree or four-year degree or more,” Jackson said.
While Jackson also cited both UAB and Innovation Depot as factors driving the brain gain in Birmingham, he also noted that there are other industries also driving the trend toward retaining young professionals. The banking industry helps by bringing large numbers of recently graduated workers here for management training, he said. Many of the students who are trained by banks here will remain here, while others will be sent to branches in other areas, Jackson said.
The BBA itself also works to bring young professionals to the area through the Talent Recruitment Project it launched during last year’s Magic City Classic football game. The alliance worked with the rival universities, Alabama A&M and Alabama State, to provide interviewing opportunities to 15 students from each school with financial sector businesses in Birmingham — BBVA Compass, Regions Financial Corp., BB&T, PNC, Wells Fargo and Northwest Mutual – and to give them a bus tour around the area as an enticement to locate here. The organization has a goal of expanding that project to include other major Birmingham events, and the other colleges in the state.
And Birmingham’s much-touted quality of life also helps stave off brain drain by attracting people to the area, Jackson said. “One of the things that we do think is a driver for getting talent to come here now is the quality of life that can be found here in Birmingham. A report came out, I think two weeks ago, that talks about the livability of Birmingham and where we rank very high as a good city to live in, and cost of living is fairly low. Those are all things I think that play into driving people to actually come here. So the role we’re trying to play is making people more aware of those opportunities — the job opportunities, the quality of life opportunities — so that we can be a recruiting force for the region.”
Quality of life, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, especially in a region where so large a percentage of the population is poor. But if greater numbers of intellectually talented people are indeed staying in Birmingham or moving to the region, there is also the possibility that more of that intellectual weight will be brought to bear on the problems in the community — part of the definition of brain gain.