It’s a common dilemma among young adults in Columbia: Should I stay or should I go?

To many 20-somethings pondering their life’s first fully independent venture, the idea of staying in Columbia seems unpalatable: Cities like Austin and Portland seem so much more exciting, while Charlotte and Atlanta seem to offer so many more opportunities. Then there’s ultra-hip Asheville, with its beautiful mountain setting and tons of cool, locally owned businesses. And don’t forget about Charleston and its alluring beaches.

In comparison, what does Columbia have to offer?

Katherine Robinson, EngenuitySC

More than you might give it credit for, actually. The city has world-class recreational options in its three rivers and the Congaree National Park; a vibrant and diverse arts scene that excels in independent film, classical music, theater, dance and the visual arts; a flagship university along with a wide array of other higher education options; a talented and broad-based local music community; an ever-expanding dining scene; and much more.

Sure, there are problems, too: limited job offerings, a high crime rate, borderline-dysfunctional local government and a relatively small supply of top-notch touring musicians coming to town.

But every time one of those 20-somethings decides that the pluses outweigh the minuses — that Columbia is the place to be — it’s a choice that matters not only to that particular individual, but also to the broader community, especially when that individual is a college graduate with a life of high earnings potential ahead of them. If they stay, they might start a successful business, volunteer with a social service organization or eventually serve on the board of a local nonprofit. If they leave — and nearly half of local 18-to-25-year olds say they plan to — all those potential contributions to the community are lost.

Addressing this lost potential — this exodus of college graduates from Columbia — is the challenge of the Columbia Talent Magnet Team. The team is a collaborative effort among EngenuitySC, which supports the development of a knowledge-based economy; COR (Columbia Opportunity Resource), a young professionals group; the Columbia Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau, which markets Columbia to convention planners and tourists; New Carolina, which promotes South Carolina’s economic competitiveness; the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce, which promotes pro-business policies; and the Southern Growth Policies Board, a North Carolina-based think tank that promotes collaboration among government, business and academic leaders.

Last fall, the Magnet Team conducted a survey and held a forum on the challenge of attracting and retaining young workers. Out of those efforts has come the Columbia Talent Magnet Report, which lays out the challenge facing the city and offers recommendations on how to get there. The report, “A Road Map to a Talent-Powered Economy,” can be found at columbiatalent.com.

Free Times sat down recently with several Magnet Team members and discussed the issue. The following are edited excerpts of that discussion.

Free Times: Tell me about the team that is assembled here, and tell me why your organization has an interest in this issue.

Greg Hilton, EngenuitySC

Greg Hilton: I work with a group called EngenuitySC. We are the regional knowledge-economy leadership group here, tasked with transitioning Columbia from traditional economic opportunity to what we would consider the knowledge-based economy. So, we are the de facto project managers, collaboration managers, of this project. We’re involved because talent attraction and retention is one of the key elements in growing a knowledge economy. That’s why we launched it and why we’re involved in it.

Mandi Engram: I’m with the Convention and Visitors Bureau and our job is to promote Columbia as a destination for visitors and for meetings to come to Columbia. We don’t market inside the state of South Carolina, but it is important for people to have pride in their community and for people to know what’s going on, because there are so many good things that are happening in this community that people just aren’t aware of, especially the university students. So I think it’s important for us to carry that message.

FT: If you are primarily focused on bringing conventions and visitors here, what is the connection between that and building the knowledge economy here?

ME: Well, it’s not just specifically building the knowledge economy; it’s building community pride. I think one of our biggest challenges is the perception that locals have of our community because they’re not aware of all the good things, all the different attractions, things we have to experience here — the arts, the culture, the rivers.

GH: Not to mention that all the things that make a city a cool place to live and learn and work and play are the same thing that attract businesses, that attract events.

ME: All the conventions that we’ve been able to land like the National Hydrogen Association; it all started with local people in the community that have been those ambassadors, that have helped us bring in those events.

FT: OK, so that’s the connection; that you make people excited about their own community and then in their own business lives, they become potential ambassadors …

ME: To spread the message to other people.

Katherine Swartz, COR

Katherine Swartz: I’m the board chair for COR, Columbia Opportunity Resource. Columbia Opportunity Resource is, we think, the Midlands’ leading young and emerging professionals organization, and what we bring to the table is the connection with young leaders and also students.
The only thing I would add is that, though non-scientific [because it was a self-selected sample], one of the things that came out of the survey was that the perception of Columbia and Midlands-area residents of their area is lower than people who have moved here or people who are visiting the area. So we have a big challenge to [try to] improve that.

Katherine Robinson: I’m Katherine Robinson with EngenuitySC, helping with the entrepreneurship piece and management of the project.

FT: If you look at it on a very surface level, South Carolina has an influx of people, and Richland County has a greater influx of people than the state as a whole. Richland County has a higher level of bachelor’s degrees than the national average. So if you look at that baseline, you might say, “We’re doing OK, so what’s the problem?”

GH: You really can’t have enough of the right assets to improve the region. So, we’re doing good in these categories, or well, but there’s a difference between doing good and doing great. Sometimes good is the enemy of great.
One of the issues we are facing is, yes, we have an influx of population. But if you dig into those numbers, that influx is anchored slightly to the older demographic. We have 8,000 students that graduate from higher education institutions here every year, and while we do keep a good number of those there are also a lot that leave. And they go to places that have a perception of having more opportunities than Columbia, places like Charlotte and Atlanta, maybe even in some cases places like Greenville and Charleston. I think that’s one of the key issues facing our region.

KS: To counter that, I would say for us it isn’t just Richland County and it isn’t just Columbia, it’s also Lexington County, Newberry County, Kershaw County. So when you combine all those and you average out statistics, it’s probably skewed not in our favor — it’s not a good statistic, it’s one where we can definitely improve things.

GH: If you go broader and you look at [population growth in] South Carolina and you look at the breakdown of those who were 35 to 60, the growth was much higher. The growth or lack thereof in the 20 to 35 age group was .5 percent. So you’ve got to look at the overall comparison: We’re strong, but we could be a lot stronger.
If you think about someone who’s 25 who moves to Columbia or to the Midlands, who has a great background and great education: They are at the beginning of their earning potential, and if we can retain them in the community, that person grows into someone who really becomes a one-person economic engine. That’s kind of the concept behind it.
And we know there’s a strong relationship between the number of people holding higher education degrees [in a community] and per capita income.

FT: And that’s one of the numbers that you all know we’re not doing so well on, not statewide, not city-wide.

GH: Yeah, not so much.

FT: Let’s talk about some of the assets Columbia has, the best features that Columbia has to get people to stay here.

Mandi Engram, Columbia Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau

ME: There are so many things to choose from. You’ve got the Museum of Art right across the street. They just had a huge international exhibition; we were the first city to get Turner to Cézanne. You’ve got the State Museum; they’re getting a planetarium and a 4-D theater. You’ve got the Nickelodeon moving into the old Fox Theater on Main Street. You’ve got the [Congaree] River that they’re developing. You’ve got EdVenture Children’s Museum. We’ve got a national park here. There are so many things to do outdoors. All these things that have happened in the last 10 or 15 years, there are a lot of things that people who were born and raised here really haven’t gone out and experienced.

KR: I think you also have to point out that Columbia not only has entertainment, recreational and cultural assets, but also the flagship university.

GH: The university has tremendous economic impact. It’s an engine now and an engine of the future, [and] with that constant influx of all these people of different backgrounds — all these students, talent, youth — it’s really important.
If you look at Columbia versus Greenville, it’s a stark difference. They may have prettier buildings or perhaps there is more focus on investment in the downtown region, but people in Greenville will say upfront that they lack the diversity that a strong higher education system brings into a community. I think it’s one of our strongest assets. It’s pervasive.

KS: I’ll add something intangible, which is just the culture of the city: It’s this welcoming, warm environment — different from other cities even in the South, definitely different from larger cities like Charlotte or Atlanta where there’s just not that warm, friendly feeling.

ME: One of the things I hear the most from people that come here is that it is a change of pace: It’s relaxing to be here, and people are so welcoming. They’ve been to other cities in the South, but there is just something different about Columbia.

FT: I think the point you made about the cultural environment being welcoming — I hear that over and over again. One of the [other] things that I like about Columbia is that you can make an impact here as an individual that you could not fathom making in Charlotte or Atlanta.

GH: It’s intangible, but it has an impact and you see it everywhere. And that’s one of the challenges: How do you communicate that feature of what we have as a community to people who may not be familiar with it?

FT: What is priority number one in this effort to attract and retain?

KR: I think it’s just improving the perception of Columbia internally and externally. A lot of people kind of have this perception of Columbia, and when they get here and look around [it changes]. Or if they already live here and they don’t really look into what’s going on, they don’t realize that we have all the assets we have.

GH: I’m going to quote one of our survey respondents, and this pretty much sums it up: Do something. Do anything. That is the priority, to create action out of what we’ve learned.

FT: In some ways, it’s such a chicken-and-egg question. Because if you successfully change the perception, then you have a cadre of young people who want to stay here. But if the jobs aren’t here then they’re forced to leave anyway.

GH: It’s not going to happen overnight. So we’re not going to check the email at columbiatalent.com and have 10,000 messages, “Hey, I just arrived in Columbia and I want to get connected, where are the jobs?” The reality is that people will go where they can find opportunity, regardless of what that means.

So, I think the strategy is threefold: First and foremost, if we can’t recruit jobs here, let’s create them ourselves. Let’s focus on entrepreneurship, not just on the commercial side but also in the way our community thinks about entrepreneurship. Two: We do have a fairly robust economy here. Per capita income may not be the highest, but we’ve got some great industries and business opportunities, and we’ve got to do something to step up the engagement in connecting young people into those companies. And the third thing is we need to focus on some industries where Columbia and the region can be world class.

ME: You’ve got to start somewhere. You’ve got to get people in here and get the message out to people about all the great things we have going on, like the hydrogen conference. Bringing people in can potentially spawn new projects and new companies that will lead to high-tech jobs.

FT: I think there’s kind of a disconnect. It’s easy look at this as an economic development question and say, “OK, this needs to be done.” But when you try to put yourself into the mindset of a 22-year-old: They don’t care about economic development; they care about what the nightlife is like. They want to know why our downtown isn’t as happening as Greenville’s. Part of it is the physical layout of the city: [Greenville] has everything laid out on one street; we have the Vista, we have Five Points, we have Main Street, and they’re not connected.

ME: I think that is one of our assets: We’ve got something for everyone. Each one of our districts caters to a different market. While they are not all in central location, it caters to a wider audience.

GH: I think it’s definitely a challenge though. When you have one thing to focus on, it’s very easy to make a decision: Put it all there. But here in Columbia, City Council or whoever, when they talk about where they want to spend their dollars, where they want to support development, it’s a much more challenging situation because you have all these different areas. So I think one of the challenges is that we have a set resource base divided among a lot of different programs. But if we can just always think about what the next opportunity is, then I think long term we’ve got better opportunities than those places that only have a couple of things that they’re focused on.

KS: From the COR membership perspective though, I hear them talk about what can I do to get involved, what can I do to get connected to the community. So, I would say, yes, it’s what am I going to be able to do on Thursday or Friday night, but it’s also that these leaders who are pushing 701 or the Nickelodeon forward, they have an army of volunteers behind them. I like to think that it’s not just about your paycheck and what you’re going to do on Friday night, but also about what you can do to make a difference.

FT: There is a lot of change, a lot of forward-thinking projects. But you also have these festering long-term things, where our readers [ask], “Why do bands go to Charlotte?” It’s been a perpetual question that I’ve been confronted with for the last 20 years: Why can’t Columbia do better on that front?

GH: That’s one of many issues. It would be great to have more live music activity here. Not to say that it’s terrible, but we can always do better.

KS: One of the issues that we’ve talked about from an entrepreneurial standpoint is that Columbia needs to do a lot better job of fostering artists — giving them a home, supporting them financially, providing the resources for them to be able to connect with each other, all those sorts of things. That’s part of our effort behind the scenes, to facilitate some of that.

FT: I think it’s really important that those kinds of issues be on the radar on the economic development front — that some people are making their life decisions based on what’s going on in the arts and what the opportunities are here.

GH: And I would just say again, speaking to our internal perceptions, that we need to do a better job of making it easy for people to find what’s going on and get connected to those things. There’s a program going on right now that just started last Monday called the Artists as Entrepreneurs Institute that Midlands Tech and Engenuity are partnering with the South Carolina Arts Commission on. You know, there are two or three musicians in there, there’s a poet, there’s a sculptor, and they’re learning how they can explore the art of the possible with their creative works, with creating a business from their passion.

FT: Well, Natalie Brown — she does the Alternacirque at Art Bar — she’s going to that. She is exactly the kind of person we are talking about: Just one person with a lot of commitment. And while we’re talking about the Arts Commission, I’ll give a shout out to their New Audience Road Show.

KR: I’m actually an [alumnus]. I was in it the first year, and now the Arts Commission has given it over to the alumni to run, so I am part of that effort. I think the arts and cultural community in Columbia is growing stronger every year. Programs like the New Audience Road Show, those arts organizations [involved] have really seen the benefit of introducing new people to their performances.

FT: I don’t think you can say enough [about the Road Show]. Even if there’s only maybe 30 people in the program each year, 30 people plus their friends can make an enormous difference for an arts organization, especially when those people tend to get involved in leadership positions after they’ve been there. Plus, it changes their entire perception of the community and what’s going on in the community.

KS: And comparatively, if you look at theater ticket prices in Atlanta, I’ve lived there, and here it’s a whole lot easier to attend more shows and different events with the different theaters and venues than it is in some of the cities where we are comparing ourselves.

FT: Since we’re on the topic of connecting people to the community, I thought that was a very important part of your report. Particularly the internship idea, the direct connections with companies, because whether it’s the arts or anything else, I think sometimes it’s hard to wrap our brains around what your mentality is when you’re in college. Your world is so small: It’s going to class, going to Five Points, going to the Vista.

GH: Maybe you step off campus for a coffee.

ME: I think it’s important to develop something with the University 101 classes to help promote how many things there are to do. Because you’re right, some students never venture out [beyond campus] other than to go to the mall or go to Starbucks. I feel like it’s our job to get into the classrooms and spread that message.

GH: Mandi is alluding to one program that we would like to see get off the ground, which is a “Welcome to Columbia” introduction to incoming freshmen or graduate students or whoever. We’ve started some of that. We’re working with the Moore School, the graduate program there, to help craft a better welcome agenda when these students come into town to get them involved with some service learning projects through COR, to get them involved with networking opportunities with the Chamber, to get past that thin film of plastic between the campus and the community.

[To Grant Jackson of the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce, just arriving]: Grant, do you want to speak to this internship program that we’re looking to do?

Grant Jackson, Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce

Grant Jackson: Well, the internship program and internships in general are critical both from the business community standpoint, because that’s a way business can connect with good talent, [and] on the other end because students that intern with companies become a lot more likely to stay in that community. They may grow and become the next generation of leadership in the community. They also may become the next generation of entrepreneurs in the community.

FT: So how does this talent group go about formalizing that process of encouraging local businesses to have more internship programs?

GH: The big picture is this: We’d like to see one fully integrated regional internship program under one banner, one brand. All universities, all the students, all the businesses, all the entrepreneurs plugging into it. A clearinghouse focused on the Midlands. That’s probably a couple of years off, because it’s a challenging and fragmented system that we have now. Each college and university has its own program, even each department has its own program, and it’s not connected into others. So what we’re working on is, let’s identify what the right model is first, let’s pilot something that we think might work, then if it works let’s roll it out on a large scale.

Through the Talent Magnet Project, the Chamber is going to be working with the USC Honors College on a pilot program to help raise the banner for the value of internships. Getting companies committed to this, creating programs and then connecting directly to the Honors College.

Actually, I don’t know if we’re supposed to be talking about this yet, now that I mention it. This is not official. It’s a pilot program.

GJ: The way it usually works is the way it worked with me when I started my newspaper career back in the dark ages. I was taking a journalism course and one of my adjunct professors was the city editor at the local paper. He came to me after class one day and said, “Would you like to intern?” Normally that’s how it works. There’s not a place to go if you don’t have a good connection. And that’s what we’re looking at with this pilot project: that connectivity, that bridge between supply and demand, basically.

ME: It’s just a daunting process. It just takes forever.

GH: I think that’s an overall theme for the entire project: Eliminate obstacles. I think that’s what we’re doing is eliminating obstacles — to people coming here, to students getting jobs, to people starting companies, to people connecting to the community. Get the obstacles out of the way and they’ll have no excuses — they’ll have to stay.

KS: And those types of students seeking internships are exactly the type of people we want to keep in Columbia, because they are aggressive and career-focused in whatever kind of career it is. And those are the people that are probably going to have the most economic impact and have the most civic impact, because those are people that are looking to get involved — they are “yes” people, go-getter types.

KR: I think you can intertwine internships and perception, because I think one of the powerful elements of internships from a student perspective is that they can discover areas and career paths that they didn’t know existed. And if they can explore many different facets of business in Columbia, that will only improve their perception of Columbia in general.

FT: Back on perception: All of us live here and we all have a pretty multifaceted understanding of where we live, but to outsiders — well, the only three things [they might know] about South Carolina are that, number one, we have a Confederate Flag flying on our State House grounds; number two, we have a state amendment against gay marriage; and number three, our governor had an affair. So how do you let them know that there is another Columbia than what they might have seen on the news?

KS: I don’t know that it’s so much our words, but it’s about giving them an opportunity to be here and experience it. Maybe it’s less our words and more of our hand holding: Let me show you what there is to do here and let you experience the way of life and meet the people. We probably can’t do it through the media, trying to combat that message, but what we can do is be good ambassadors for our city and teach others how to be good ambassadors as well.

GH: Amen.

ME: And I think that people locally are more in tune to those negative messages than outsiders are. Very rarely have I had someone visiting from outside Columbia bring those things up — occasionally jokingly, if something big is going on — but for the most part we don’t hear about it.

FT: With such an ambitious and multifaceted agenda — from perceptions to actually attracting business — how can you communicate a message clearly and effectively and keep it on the radar?

KR: We’re going to spend the next year going to different groups presenting the report and talking about the issue, and I think from that hopefully some of those people will go out and tell other people and it will create, as we say in the report, the launching of 1,000 initiatives that will be self-sustaining.

ME: And as far as branding the community and getting that message out there, Grant and I have been involved with several different stakeholder meetings bringing realtors together and all these local ad agencies together, people who are out there putting messages out about Columbia.

GH: The good news is that having a great place to live, learn, work and play is good — you can pretty much sell that message to anybody. But we also have some programs that we’re looking at rolling out to keep the momentum. We’re going to be doing another forum in the fall or early spring to continue to address these issues. And so we have two or three things that we are planning collectively and doing as a group that we are taking ownership of. And then we have another list of specific recommendations that we are going to put out there and say, “We need partners to get these things done.”

FT: It seems that a lot of it comes down to what Katherine [Swartz] said about giving the individual a good experience. One person goes through an internship or the New Audience Road Show and all of a sudden you’ve taken that one talented, intelligent person and sort of flipped on a light bulb about what their opportunities might be here.

KS: Yes, sort of a small-wins mindset. A lot of the projects we are thinking about here are huge, but if we just think about one step at a time, one person at a time, if we can change their perception or at least get them thinking about changing their perception. If we can just do that with 20 people, that’s a win because that’s 20 people who are going to tell 20 or 30 others and it will have the viral effect. 

Let us know what you think: Email editor@free-times.com.