In an effort to understand why so many college graduates are leaving western Pennsylvania, recent college graduates from three Pittsburgh-area universities were surveyed about their career and location decisions. The results indicated some increase in those staying between 1994 and 1999. A logistic regression analysis showed that an improving economy, low housing costs, and ample opportunities for continuing education were the major reasons. However, the region is still losing disproportionate numbers of minorities and graduates in high-tech fields and is attracting few immigrants. The major competition was from neighboring states rather than the Sun Belt. Low salaries and lack of advancement opportunities, especially for women, minorities, and twocareer couples, were the primary reasons. The results suggest several policy recommendations to help retain recent area graduates and to attract more highly skilled workers to the region.How do recent college graduates decide where to live and work? And how can they be persuaded to remain in the region where they attended college? These are vital questions for many states and cities currently experiencing a "brain drain"-a net outflow of college graduates, particularly those in scientific or technical fields. This article reports on a large survey of recent university graduates from the Pittsburgh region and uses a multivariate model to predict their decisions to stay or leave that region. The results can tell us a great deal about what young people value in their work, how they go about finding jobs, and the relative importance of monetary incentives, family ties, and lifestyle choices in their career and location decisions.
THEORIES OF BRAIN DRAIN AND MIGRATION PATTERNSThe "third wave" of state and local economic development is focusing on issues of human capital and the shortage of workers with the requisite skills for the new economy (Hornbeck & Salamon, 1991). Human capital issues are particularly troubling to older industrial cities and agricultural states that have experienced little or no population growth in recent decades. Slow population growth and the graying of the population point to slower rates of job creation and declining tax revenues in the future. Wilensky (2002, p. 497) describes a demographic trend common to many
Nonprofit managers often report difficulties in hiring and retaining top-quality professional staff members. The goals of this study were to assess the seriousness of the problems and to identify some best practices that can be used by nonprofit managers. The study focused on small and mid-sized nonprofits in the human service and community development fields in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Although the problems identified were not of crisis proportion, organizations faced particular difficulties in hiring and retaining staff members in information technology and development. Use of contemporary recruitment techniques, including the Internet, was surprisingly limited, but some organizations had creative approaches to retaining valued employees.
Since the 1960s, the EU institutions have relied on a system of open competitions (or concours) for hiring staff, with only incremental changes. That system is now undergoing a major reform that is currently in the implementation phase. A policy analysis approach explains how the leadership of the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) overcame resistance to change. Analysis from a public management and political sociology perspective sheds light on the challenges EPSO faces in the implementation and evaluation of the reform.
Points for practitionersOne strength of the EU staffing model is the active role of EU staff in selecting their peers through the use of Selection Boards. The new system maintains staff involvement while professionalizing the Selection Boards. The reform was responsive to complaints by managers and heads of EU institutions with a slow, complex, and antiquated system, and it is they, as key clients, who will ultimately evaluate the effectiveness of the reform in enabling them to hire top-quality staff more quickly.
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