New analysis finds Wisconsin has relatively low departure rates among college-educated residents but attracts too few newcomers, especially from farther away and among people born in other states

MADISON, Wisconsin, September 8, 2026 – Wisconsin has spent years worrying about “brain drain.” A new report from the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy finds that the state’s more persistent talent problem lies elsewhere.

College-educated Wisconsin residents do not leave the state at unusually high rates. They leave at relatively low rates. Wisconsin’s longstanding weakness is attraction: too few college-educated newcomers arrive, especially from farther away and among people born in other states.

A widely cited recent ranking placed Wisconsin second nationally for “net brain drain.” That statistic is not a migration rate. It compares the educational attainment of Wisconsin-born adults living in other states with that of adults born in other states who now live in Wisconsin. Among those same groups, Wisconsin has more college-educated natives living in other states than college-educated adults born in other states living here, as do most states. But counting people rather than comparing education shares puts Wisconsin 31st of 50, not second. Neither measure tells us whether college graduates are currently leaving Wisconsin faster than they arrive.

Direct measures of current migration answer a different question. From 2021 through 2024, Wisconsin received about 20,900 college-educated interstate arrivals ages 25 to 44 each year. If Wisconsin attracted newcomers at the median state’s rate, about 28,600 would have arrived each year, roughly 7,600 more people annually. Most of that gap, however, reflects Wisconsin’s generally low circulation. Given Wisconsin’s unusually low departure rate, the national relationship between arrivals and departures implies a remaining shortfall of roughly 1,500 arrivals a year.

“Wisconsin’s educated residents leave at relatively low rates, and many of the people who move here are Wisconsinites coming home,” said Ananth Seshadri, co-director of CROWE and professor of economics at UW–Madison. “Wisconsin is better at attachment than attraction. The harder problem is persuading people who were not born in Wisconsin to choose the state and build their future here.”

Among the report’s findings:

 Wisconsin has low arrivals and low departures. The arrival rate for college-educated adults ages 25 to 44 is about 18 percent below the national rate. The departure rate is about 16 percent below the national rate. Wisconsin lost college graduates on net during parts of the 2010s, but recent flows are approximately balanced.

 The weakness becomes much clearer with distance. For moves of more than 500 miles, Wisconsin attracts college-educated newcomers at about 62 percent of the rate implied by its shareof the college-educated population, compared with about 86 percent for the median state. Adjusting for Wisconsin’s geographic exposure strengthens rather than weakens the result, and the finding remains under alternative distance definitions and when Illinois is excluded.

 Many newcomers are actually coming home. About 31 percent of Wisconsin’s college-educated interstate arrivals were born in Wisconsin, compared with about 20 percent in the median state. Among arrivals from more than 500 miles away, 29.5 percent were Wisconsin-born, compared with 16.2 percent in the median state.

 The pattern is decades old. The same combination of weak long-distance attraction and heavy reliance on returning natives appears in the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses. Wisconsin ranked in the bottom fifth of states for long-distance attraction in all three periods, while its returning-native share ranked near the top. The pattern predates today’s political and policy debates by decades.

The report also examines whether Wisconsin’s occupational structure helps explain the attraction gap. Occupational structure is associated with arrival rates, but it leaves a large regional shortfall unexplained. Milwaukee is where the migration and employment evidence line up most clearly: from 2010 to 2024, employment in four knowledge-based sectors fell 2.9 percent in the four-county Milwaukee area while rising 29.1 percent nationally and 30.9 percent in Dane County.

The report does not establish which direction causation runs. Weak job growth may deter movers, weak inflow may itself slow job growth, or both may reflect other forces.

The report proposes a simple test for policies promoted as talent strategies: Would this plausibly change the decision of someone with little built-in reason to choose Wisconsin?

That is the question the report argues Wisconsin should be asking.

The analysis draws primarily on Census and American Community Survey migration data for college-educated adults ages 25 to 44, together with historical comparisons and robustness checks using alternative age ranges, distance thresholds and measures of migration.

Please click the link for the full report: Reports of Wisconsin’s Brain Drain Are Greatly Exaggerated: The State’s Real Talent Problem Is Who Doesn’t Come.

About CROWE

The Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE) was established in 2017 in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. CROWE supports and disseminates economic policy research from a market perspective, with a particular focus on Wisconsin and state-level policy. Its work combines original research, student engagement and public outreach.

For more information, visit crowe.wisc.edu.
For questions about the report, contact Ananth Seshadri at ananth.seshadri@wisc.edu.