Recent college graduates should not have to leave the communities they have grown to love simply because entry-level wages cannot keep pace with the cost of living.
Picture this: you’re a 20-year-old senior in college set to graduate in just seven short months.
You have worked hard in college and have been blessed with not having to take out any student loans.
With this though, your savings have dwindled dramatically, and you are wondering if you will be able to foot the bill for your last semester, let alone support yourself once you have to start paying rent.
You’ve made connections in your city that you would do pretty much anything to stay close.
Living here has allowed you to grow relationally, professionally and emotionally in ways that simply weren’t available to you in Bourbon, Missouri, your hometown of just over 1,500 residents.
Plain and simple, you just desperately want to be able to stay.
You pray every day, multiple times a day, that the Lord would make a way for you to be able to stay in your city.
And even though you believe wholeheartedly that, ultimately, the Lord’s plans are better than yours ever could be, He hears your prayers and He is more than able to provide… the fear of disappointment still looms.
And at some point, you have to stop and ask yourself: Wait. Is this just me?
Am I the only soon-to-be college graduate wondering how am I supposed to turn a degree into a life I can actually afford?
Am I the only one looking at rent prices and entry-level salaries, and thinking, how is this supposed to work?
Maybe I’m just overthinking it.
Maybe I need to apply for better-paying jobs that I would have no interest in doing.
Maybe I need to get a roommate, even though I thrive in my own space.
Maybe I need to make a stricter budget, cut back on the things I enjoy and accept that the first few years after college may just have to be extremely frugal?
And maybe some of that is true.
But the more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder if this was really just a me problem.
Because surely I can’t be the only college senior who desperately wants to stay in the city where she went to school.
I can’t be the only person who has spent three years making friends, finding church community, building professional connections and discovering favorite coffee shops and parks, only to face graduation with the possibility that I may have to leave it.
And if I’m not the only one, then maybe this isn’t just a personal budgeting problem.
Maybe it’s a bigger question worth asking: what happens when the young people who want to stay in a community can’t afford to live there?
That’s where my personal concern starts to become a much larger conversation about wages, housing and what it actually takes for a recent college graduate to build a life after graduation.
Recent college graduates aren’t asking for everything to be handed to them.
We know that starting a career comes with sacrifices.
We know that our first jobs may not be our dream jobs and our first apartments might not be exactly what we’d hoped it’d be, but there should still be a reasonable path toward building a life in the communities where we want to stay.
For many of us, that means being able to work a full-time job, afford a modest place to live and still have enough left over to enjoy the community we’ve become a part of.
If cities want to retain young professionals, affordability has to be part of that conversation.
Because graduating from college shouldn’t automatically mean leaving behind the people, places and communities that made those years feel like home.
Sometimes, we don’t want to leave. We just want to be able to afford to stay.
