Over the past decade and a half, more than 60% of South Carolina college graduates went to work in the Palmetto State in the year after receiving their diploma.
But by year three, that drops 10 percentage points, and by year five less than half of those same graduates are still working in the state, according to a new study by the state’s employment agency.
On a national basis, South Carolina lands in the middle third of states when it comes to retaining its graduates.
Economists from the state Department of Employment and Workforce tracked technical and four-year college graduates from the class of 2010 through the class of 2023, who are now three years out of school — to see how many stayed in South Carolina to work and how many left to pursue a job or further their education elsewhere.
The study, which relied on unemployment insurance wage records, did not count federal government workers, the self-employed or military members. Researchers also adjusted for students who went on to further their education in South Carolina rather than joining the workforce after graduation.
The study also measured how many students go to work within their field of study.
“Are nursing students becoming nurses or are they working as (medical) office receptionists?” said Erica Von Nessen, one of the researchers.
Lawyers, architects and health care students are the most likely to have careers in South Carolina that most closely match their degrees, the researchers found.
But they also took the data a step further to see how some degree-holders’ skillsets might still translate into jobs not directly related to their studies.
“One of the things we found was there are a substantial number of people with an English major who become paralegals,” researcher Bryan Grady said. “When you think about the skills that you acquire as an English major and the skills that are required to be a paralegal, there’s clearly an overlap there.”
Speaking to manufacturers and business people in Columbia last week at an annual workforce conference put on by the state’s largest industry group, Von Nessen and Grady highlighted findings on some of the state’s most in-demand fields — education, nursing and engineering.
Here’s how many are graduating from SC colleges with in-demand degrees. It’s not enough.
Engineering graduates, for example, tend to take a few years to find work in their field. In the first year after graduation, fewer than 62% of students found work as engineers at South Carolina companies. By year four, that rose to nearly 71%.
Those that didn’t get an engineering job right away still tended to be designers, construction managers, financial analysts or office clerks in the state.
And while the state often talks about struggling to keep teachers in the classroom, Von Nessen said nearly 70% of graduates were still working in education 15 years later.
“That’s very encouraging to me because I was thinking, ‘Oh, are we going to see something like 30% retention,’” she said.
Of nursing graduates, most got jobs in South Carolina right away — 98% — and stayed in them for a long time — 80% remained in the field 15 years later.
On the other hand, Grady said, business graduates were less likely to work in the state. But downtown Charlotte, the country’s second largest banking center, is just 10 miles north of the South Carolina border.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they’re going to want some some business majors up there,” he said.
Von Nessen and Grady’s study was part of larger legislative efforts to reshuffle oversight of the state’s workforce development efforts.
A 2023 law put all state-funded workforce development programs under the employment department’s microscope, making sure programs run by various agencies are all delivering on their goals.
Other tenets of the law included an annual analysis of job openings versus college graduates available to fill them.
“I think a lot of the discussion has been around career pathways and pipelines of we just need to plug people into these holes,” Grady said. “But the fact is, there are a lot of factors that determine what kind of job somebody ends up with. How do we make sure that the workforce of South Carolina as a whole has a wide variety of skills that employers are interested in, so that we don’t have to scramble?”
In the future, Von Nessen said they hope to work with colleges to measure how well their efforts to keep graduates in state are working.
More SC colleges want to help pay students who land summer internships
For example, the University of South Carolina offers $3,000 to students who participate in internships in high-demand industries in the state, such as aerospace, automotive, energy, financial services, healthcare, insurance and manufacturing.
More than 2,862 students across the USC college system, 74% of them in-state, have participated. They’ve gone to work for 891 companies across 43 South Carolina counties, according to a statement from the university. The school has awarded more than $8.6 million in stipends since the program started three years ago
Clemson University, too, operates a similar program but the school did not provide updated numbers in time for deadline.
The internship programs are taxpayer funded, with $4 million going to Clemson annually and $3 million now going to the USC system.
Coastal Carolina University had asked state legislators to spend $390,000 annually to start its own Teal Works Program, but the funding didn’t make it into the final budget.
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.