By Dennis Quick
Quick Notes

The Nov. 27 issue of the Charleston Regional Business Journal reported that 54% of South Carolina’s soon-to-be college graduates plan to seek employment in another state.

According to the “South Carolina Student Retention Survey” released in August by Greenville Forward, a nonprofit economic development organization based in the Upstate, South Carolina is losing at least 10,000 recent college graduates a year, representing more than $369 million in lost salaries.

For those of us who sing the praises of South Carolina’s economy, that is a sobering slap in the face.

With all the preening and eyelash-batting we do in front of the economic mirror, admiring our irresistible quality of life, our voluptuous tourism and hospitality industries, our hot construction activity, the sizzling Charleston port, our sexy initiatives to inject more knowledge-based industry into the Palmetto State, we seem to have lost sight of one terribly plain fact: We’re not as pretty as we think we are.

Despite our annual sunny economic forecasts, in which the number of new jobs usually is projected to grow a few percentage points each year (the forecasts tend to avoid mentioning the wages those jobs pay), most of our best-educated youth pack up their diplomas and flee across our borders.

Their flight is understandable. The average salary in South Carolina, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, is $32,250, about 18% lower than the national average. The average salary in North Carolina, a popular destination for our college grads, is $34,460. Georgia, another favorite post-graduate destination due largely to Atlanta, has an average salary of $36,290. Our grads also consider venturing way up North to New York state, where the average salary is $44,060 (but then, the cost of living there, especially in New York City, is much higher also).

We talk endlessly of attracting and launching more biotech and other high-tech, high-paying businesses in our state. It’s something we definitely need to keep talking about. But while we’re busy with Innoventure and ThinkTEC expos and conferences and this and that, states like North Carolina are doing what we’re only talking about.

For instance, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center announced in November that Quintiles Transnational Corp., based in Durham and billed as the world’s largest clinical research organization, will expand in Durham County, creating 1,000 new jobs paying an average annual salary of more than $65,000.

In April, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park—something our state doesn’t come close to having—announced that worldwide financial services giant Credit Suisse will invest $40 million to expand its “Center of Excellence” facility, adding 400 operations and information technology jobs over the next two years. What are these jobs paying? Let me quote the press release: “While wages will vary by job function, the average annual compensation for the new positions is projected to be at least $86,000, plus benefits.”

Mercy! Makes you wonder why most of us South Carolinians stick around in the Palmetto State when greener, fatter bucks lie on the other side of the state line.

True, we’ve got Benefitfocus.com, a solid benefits-software company that plans to increase its 300-employee payroll by another 300 over the next two years and which pays an average annual salary of about $65,000. We’ve got software-maker Blackbaud, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and the Vought/Global Aeronautica aircraft assembly complex, all of which are major employers paying salaries well above the state’s average. And that’s just in the Lowcountry. In the Upstate, BMW is the big employer.

However, BMW and the Vought/Global Aeronautica complex are largely assembly centers, not research and development centers. And R&D spawns the handsome salaries we dream about. While South Carolina’s economy consists of only a dab of R&D companies here, maybe a dollop there, the Tar Heel State’s Research Triangle Park alone houses some 130 R&D companies. And those companies help drive up North Carolina’s per capita income.

Sadly, South Carolina college grads leaving the state for greener pastures is a tradition stretching back, I would imagine, to the end of World War II, when the U.S. emerged as a superpower whose glittering economic and intellectual muscle got flexed most visibly in the North and on the West Coast. Tobacco fields and textile mills simply were not that attractive to the learned.

Of course, back in the day, North Carolina had a brain drain, too. Much of the South did. But in the 1950s, the Tar Heel State became visionary and started planting the seeds that eventually sprouted its Research Triangle. Georgia—that is, Atlanta—got rocking in the 1970s and grew from a small city to a traffic-clogged megalopolis.

What was South Carolina doing? Not much, apparently. However, in recent years we’ve come a long way.

And while we’ve become a place favored more by retirees than by young people eager to make their way in the world, we must transform the Palmetto State to a place where folks can comfortably start their careers and not just live out the rest of their lives.

Dennis Quick is senior staff writer at the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.

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