Des Moines Register
07-24-07
Brain Drain lures community college grads away from Iowa
By LISA ROSSI
REGISTER AMES BUREAU
Iowa regent institutions who have worked so hard to attract community college
graduates are seeing the drain of those students to Iowa’s border states, a new
study finds.
The ISU study shows that even though more than half of community college
transfers attend Iowa’s public universities, about 400 community college
associate degree graduates a year are leaving the state for more expensive
education elsewhere.
This is bad news for Iowa regents, who see community colleges as the panacea
to dwindling high school graduates who have traditionally fed enrollment at the
regents universities, which are the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and
the University of Northern Iowa.