Dreaming of one day improving Louisiana, Manu Kamat, economics junior and New Orleans native, plans to attend law school and eventually settle down in the Pelican State. Unlike Kamat, many residents are leaving Louisiana. Louisiana’s population dropped from 4.5 million in 2000 to 4.29 million in 2007, according to The American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. And nearly 55 percent of residents leaving the state in 2006 were under the age of 30 — causing many to question whether Louisiana is falling victim to a “brain drain.”Sara Crow, Career Services manager, said there may be a “brain drain,” but most University students plan to stay in Louisiana after graduating, according to a survey taken by students who graduated in May and August of 2008. Distributed by Career Services, the survey found that 54 percent of those graduates said they were employed and planned to live in Louisiana, followed by 14.4 percent employed in Texas. The survey is e-mailed to students every graduation period using their PAWS accounts. Several follow-up e-mails and phone calls are made by Career Services officials to ensure the highest number of participants. Crow said though many students do not reply to the survey — 16.7 percent didn’t respond to the May-August 2008 survey — the numbers accurately reflect the distribution of students around the state and the country. “Our students are kind of homebodies,” Crow said. “You have a lot of students at LSU who grew up in Louisiana — maybe they want to move back to their home city, or they want to move to a different city in Louisiana. We tend to have a lot of students who are interested in staying here.”Crow said many students tell her they want to leave Louisiana for a few years after graduating but eventually want to return to the state to raise their families. She said University students’ desire to stay in state is a “double-edged sword” from a recruiter’s perspective. “There have been times when recruiters from other states have expressed [they] didn’t meet any students who wanted to move to Oregon or California,” Crow said. Crow, who has worked in Career Services since 2005, said she has noticed an increased interest among students to work in Washington, D.C. She said Texas companies recruit heavily at the University, and interest in the Lone Star State is always high. Jewel Caillet, marketing senior, said she plans to stay in Louisiana for graduate school but ultimately wants to move to a larger city to pursue a career in sports marketing. “To get far in what I want to do, you need to be in more high-traffic areas,” Caillet said. According to the survey, the top three cities that May and August graduates of 2008 picked to live are Baton Rouge, Houston and New Orleans. “I think that a lot of people see Louisiana as a potential place for growth,” Crow said. “Anyone who’s tuned into the media knows that Louisiana is constantly being named as one of the best places to ride out the economic downturn that we’re experiencing right now. Certainly [Gov. Bobby Jindal] has drawn a lot of attention with his very aggressive efforts to make Louisiana a better place to be.” Jindal recently addressed The American Community Survey.”People love this state. The reason they are leaving is because of lack of educational and lack of economic opportunities,” Jindal told The Advocate on Nov. 16. “It is key to improving our quality of life and moving our state forward to be able to provide the opportunities to keep our people home.”Jindal said he thinks progress is being made and cited his administration’s changes to ethics laws — like requiring more public employees to keep closer tabs on their financial holdings — and intensified workforce development as beneficial efforts. And although many residents left the state after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the governor didn’t cite the storms as the main reason. “Our top priority has got to be the out-migration of our people,” Jindal said. “It would be a mistake to blame this on the hurricanes. This has been going on for the last 15 years, at least. We’ve been the only state in the South to consistently see more of our people move out faster than people are moving in.”Crow said she hasn’t noticed students being negative about Louisiana’s job market and expects their desire to leave the state for economic opportunity to decrease in the future. “You will sometimes visit with students who will say, ‘I’ve got to move because there’s just nothing for me here,’ and sometimes that’s misconception,” Crow said. “Sometimes there’s a lack of research and awareness and sometimes, depending on how narrow your focus is, you might have to move … and that’s just a matter of weighing personal choices and choosing what’s the right path for you.” The digital media industry is blooming in Louisiana, with the new Electronic Arts North American Test Center on LSU South Campus and the Baton Rouge-based Nerjyzed Entertainment recent release of the Black College Football Experience for the Xbox 360.Adam Knapp, CEO of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, said to decrease out-migration in Louisiana, markets in Baton Rouge have to expand. High-growth companies like EA are key to economic development, he said. “The thing we have to work on is specialty areas,” Knapp said. “We need a strategy to build dynamic, high-growth companies.”Knapp said more emphasis on early education, a better transportation system and continuing efforts toward establishing LSU as one of the top research universities in the country will help alleviate the “brain drain” and entice people to live and work in Louisiana. The “Grants for Grads Program,” paid for by the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency, may also persuade college graduates to stay in Louisiana. Passed into law last year, the program provides $10,000 toward homes purchased by students after they graduate. One hundred students are chosen through a lottery each year among qualified applicants for the program.  “I would love to improve the state instead of being one of those people who sits in the corner and cries about it,” Kamat said.—-Contact Kyle Bove at [email protected]