At Cassill Motors in Cedar Rapids, a small group of high schoolers tours the autobody shop floor. They look around wide-eyed at the vehicles lifted into the air and mechanics hurrying between work bays.
The group is from City View High School, a magnet school in Cedar Rapids that requires students to participate in community-based internships. Job shadows like this one are an opportunity for high schoolers to get out of the classroom and see jobs in their community — work that they might like to do one day.
“It is higher student learning, it is deeper connection to their communities, it’s a deeper connection to people, it is students building their networks within the place where they are and then taking those skills to build networks no matter where they are,” said Dennis Becker, the magnet coordinator at City View.
Job shadows are one way that leaders in eastern Iowa are addressing large numbers of young and educated workers leaving the state — a pattern known as “brain drain.”
A 2024 Iowa Workforce Development survey found that 38% of students at private and public colleges across the state, including career and technical schools, chose to leave the state. In March, the state reported a loss of 2,000 jobs in professional and business services, bringing cumulative non-farm job growth down to negative 500 so far in 2025.
When this happens over long periods of time, it can result in a shrinking skilled workforce and slowed technological development.
'Telling the story' of the community
In eastern Iowa, the rich labor supply of garden-fresh graduates could be improving the region’s technological and medical industries at rates like other Midwestern areas with a higher education institution. But just over half of respondents in a University of Iowa survey said they stayed in Iowa, compared to 75% of graduates from the University of Minnesota and nearly 90% from the University of Wisconsin.
At the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance, a new talent attraction initiative is trying to figure out how to bend the curve.
Jodi Schafer was hired as the first-ever talent attraction director when the mayors of Cedar Rapids and its suburbs, Marion and Hiawatha, developed the Collaborative Growth Initiative, a blueprint for talent attraction to the area.
“Making sure we have the people in the community who can tell the story when they’re talking to people that are looking at our community, that is part of the job,” Schafer said. “It’s putting infrastructure in place that allows the word to get out, so the people that are considering the area have a reference point and have somebody to talk to.”
Although it's still in its early days, the talent attraction initiative is workshopping strategies for bringing people in from out of state, including digital marketing and remote work campaigns. Schafer said a digital marketing campaign is more cost-effective than billboards and is something communities across the country are doing to attract talent.
But the remote work campaign, she says, is a more short-term fix that could lead to long-term benefits.
“That’s something we’re looking into for a short-term win while we build out some of the pipelines for bringing workforce back into the state or back into the community,” Schafer said.
With new customer relationship management technology, Schafer said it’s now possible to more accurately measure factors that drive population growth. Even five years ago, the technology infrastructure was not nearly as robust.
“I think that technology has changed, and it allows us to do more than what it did previously,” Schafer said. “Now there are some CRM [customer relationship management] systems that can track, there are ways to figure out if they actually moved.”
Schafer’s role is to bring people into the state. Her teammate, Laura Seyfer, is trying to figure out how to keep them here.
“A lot of the mindset is that you have to go somewhere else to be someone,” Seyfer said. “We don’t appreciate what we have going on in this community, that there are a lot of great things happening.”
Seyfer said the team coordinates with college career advisors to educate them on opportunities that exist in the Cedar Rapids metro area. The economic alliance is also making sure young professionals and students have opportunities to network by hosting events and regular sessions that connect workers with local businesses, like Ignite CR and Impact CR.
Connecting college students with workers in the community helps them to establish a sense of belonging. But Seyfer acknowledged that there are some things the taskforce can’t really change that may cause someone to go somewhere else, like the weather or the job market in some industries.
Students say politics is also a big factor in their decision to leave.
“There might not be what they’re looking for here, so they’re going to have to go somewhere else. And we have to be ok with that,” Seyfer said.
'A lot more opportunities’ elsewhere
JJ SchraderBachar decided to stay in Iowa after he earned his degree in computer science from Iowa State University last May. He said the reason he stayed was because he got a job in West Des Moines related to his training, although he applied for jobs out of state, as well.
“I think a lot of people are inclined to stay here,” SchraderBachar said. “It’s a lot easier to stay somewhere where not everyone has the drive to explore and stuff like that.”
He said most of his high school and college friends decided to stay in Iowa, and he doesn’t feel like his decision to stay puts him in the minority. Two thirds of ISU graduates do decide to stay in Iowa.
Isabel Thomas is a second-year master’s student at the University of Iowa College of Public Health. She grew up in West Des Moines and wanted to be close to family during college.
But now, she’s considering moving out of state. She's looking at Minnesota, where she feels there are more work opportunities.
“When I’m looking at public health jobs in Iowa, there’s not a ton of options, especially at smaller, local levels that I would like to be at,” Thomas said.
Thomas is more attracted to the social justice aspects of public health, like health equity. Even if there was a market for the type of work she wants to do, she said it would be hard to overlook recent legislation she disagrees with.
“I think Iowa has changed in some significant ways, some interesting ways, even since I’ve been in high school,” Thomas said. “I think it’s just a different environment than the Iowa my family grew up in.”
She said the state's recent removal of gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act and changes in funding for public schools are reasons she and her partner, who were both raised in Iowa, do not want to raise a child in the state.
“Partially because of what my industry is, there is a lot of transferable skills where I could do work that’s maybe not necessarily exactly what I want to be doing, but is adjacent enough where I would feel good about staying here if I felt like my values were better represented in policy,” Thomas said.
Fighting brain drain is ‘not for the weak of heart’
Health care workers like Thomas — people who may not want to be physicians but do want to work in the field — are a group the taskforce is trying to grow in eastern Iowa, while state officials tackle the statewide physician shortage.
“It's a big concern, really at a statewide level,” Schafer said. “The work we’re doing, we’re sort of diving into this health care space and thinking about more of the jobs outside of being a physician, because that’s a really big nut to crack.”
And it’s a collaborative effort. The Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance has a public policy branch that regularly engages with legislators to ensure member’s concerns are addressed at the state level.
“I think we have to be hitting this problem from all sides — infrastructure, marketing, making sure college and high school students understand the potential,” Schafer said. “It’s not a one-pronged issue. It’s a multi-tiered challenge, and we have to be hitting on all of it.”
Right now, it’s about taking advantage of what the region has to offer.
But for the teams trying to tackle brain drain at both the local and state levels, endurance may be the most important factor in being able to succeed.
“This is not for the weak of heart. We have to stick with it. It’s not a one-year thing,” Schafer said. “We won’t be successful if we don’t play this out three years and beyond. It really should be something you never stop doing.”
