Video

Out migration. It's something we have heard alot about in the last few years. However, now with more opportunities coming to North Dakota are the young people wanting to stay? Brad Feldman joins us now with the final part of his series, Open Invitation. Growing up in North Dakota one thing I always heard from friends was they cant wait to get out of the state. Eight years after graduating from high school I am starting to see more classmates move back. However, with all of the new opportunities in oil, the energy industry and medical fields, is this enough to keep the young people in the state? {Package} (Derek Miller/ Senior, SMCHS) I would say that we have opportunities, same quality of opportunities no. Each of these four students is about to begin life on their own. This means finding a career to make a living. (Alex Schmidt/ Senior, SMCHS) I would say most of them are good jobs and the pay is not as high as in Minneapolis or some of the other bigger cities. But the cost of living is lower too so it is kind of a trade off. Once they have this career they will face one of the toughest decisions, where do they want to live? (Derek Miller/ Senior, SMCHS) I'm guessing people want to experience new things and they think North Dakota may be sheltered from some of those opportunities. (Anne Cleary/ Senior, SMCHS) I would love to raise a family in Bismarck. Its a perfect place to raise a family. To get more thoughts of young people we put together this short, six question survey. We took it to two different high schools in Bismarck to see how sophomores and seniors look at the opportunities in the state. The first question we asked, Do you believe there are opportunities in North Dakota after you graduate from college? The answer was overwhelmingly yes by each grade surveyed. The students stated which industries they see opportunities. Here is there top five. The number next to the industry is how many times that specific industry was mentioned. You can see medical, education and technology are consistently in the top three. Power plants or energy are also listed by each of the classes. The number next to the industry is how many times that specific industry was mentioned. However, the students who mentioned there are not opportunities in the state, specifically mentioned these industries. They are looking for something to do with the arts, video game technology, fashion, automotive or business. Knowing it takes more than just a job to get someone to decide where to live, we put together a list of five traits and asked the students to rank them. One being the most important and five being the least important. When it comes to quality of life, both sophomores and seniors stated it was the most important. Then we asked about the wage and cost of living. The sophomores had more of a neutral position on this issue while seniors again stated it was one of the most important factors. When it comes to their safety, both classes ranked this as being one of the most important issues. One concern brought up yesterday by Josh Blikre about living in a big city is the commute time. He mentioned it takes about thirty minutes just to drive ten miles. These students consider the time it takes to get to work only somewhat important. The last trait we wanted the students to rank is entertainment. You can see the sophomores consider this to be somewhat important. However there's a huge range of how much weight Seniors give entertainment about the same amount think it's the most important as the least important. After the students had a chance to factor in all of this information, we asked them if they plan to stay in North Dakota after their education is complete. As you can see more sophomores are willing to move away while the seniors are split. As I was going through the surveys I found one interesting trend. Twenty-nine of the sophomores and twenty-three of the seniors who answered yes to the first question on whether there are opportunities in the state later stated they still wanted to move out of North Dakota.