Thursday, April 01, 2010

Best Cities For Job-Seeking Grads



After years of acquiring arcane knowledge in challenging classes and performing arduous tasks dictated by their professorial overlords, recent college grads are handed a final assignment to complete with alacrity and general excellence: get a good job with your shiny, new diploma.

Where in America are newly graduated scholars most likely to find gainful employment? Turns out they may not have to leave their off-campus housing. As it happens, an abundance of research activity and highly skilled workers means that bustling university towns are great for business, and an excellent place to look for that first job out of college.

An article on the abcNEWS Money web site explains:

Research universities tend to be great environments for business, as they're flush with cheap, highly talented labor (recent grads), and the massive research and development budgets universities have. Plenty of the world's top companies, including Dell, Cisco Systems and Google, began in university settings.

Universities provide the future educated labor force and are centers of innovation, which creates an ideal ecosystem for start-ups," says Antonio Ubalde, chief executive of ZoomProspector.com, a San Francisco-based corporate relocation and start-up consulting firm. He notes that new technologies developed in many schools wind up growing into businesses of their own: "Research universities spin off academic innovations into commercial enterprises."

In general, college towns also tend to be more interesting places in which to live, with the kind of well-developed cultural and intellectual diversity that can help keep sharp minds happy, healthy, and growing. Strong economic environments and the ever-present need for student housing also makes real estate in university burgs a better than average investment.

As an adjunct to the abcNEWS article, Forbes.com lists job growth, university employment, and other details about the cities that made the list of their "Top College Towns for Jobs" (click here to view the slideshow).

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