I for one wish that more UVA students hit the road...

The New York Times


July 27, 2008
Towns They Don’t Want to Leave
By RACHEL AVIV

AFTER graduating from Brown in May, David Noriega, a 21-year-old comparative literature major from Binghamton, N.Y., moved a few miles away from campus and began reading the books he didn’t have time for in college. While most of his classmates have started jobs in new cities, he is paying cheap rent, playing in a noise band, working on translating two Mexican novels — a voluntary extension of his thesis — and looking for a day job that’s “probably not motivating or career-furthering.”

“The graduation ceremony is this giant, expensive gesture telling you that you are done here,” says Mr. Noriega. “And yet I’m still wandering around the same spaces, passing the desolate main green, wondering what exactly it is that I’m doing.”

Mr. Noriega, faced with the pressure of graduation, is not alone in his decision to, more or less, ignore it. Come commencement, many linger for months or years, prolonging the intermediate stage between college and the rest of their lives.

“This generation doesn’t know what to do with its own freedom,” says Ethan Watters, author of “Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment.” “As the average age of marriage continues to rise, the length of time that college graduates live alone before starting a family is unprecedented. People now have 10, even 15 years where nothing much is expected of them.” Parents who help cover health insurance, and sometimes rent, unwittingly encourage a few extra years of idealism.

The economy during this graduation cycle does not offer much impetus either. The unemployment rate rose to 5.5 percent in May, the largest one-month surge in more than two decades, and remained at that level in June. The National Association of Colleges and Employers predicts an 8 percent increase in hiring of new graduates, but that represents a significant drop from the double-digit increases of the previous four years.

If a disproportionate number of stay-behind graduates seem to be artists who work more than one job, live with multiple friends and play a string instrument, it’s not necessarily a coincidence. College towns cultivate creative types. Providence, R.I., (Brown) and Charlottesville (University of Virginia) are known for their visual arts scenes; Iowa City (University of Iowa) and Missoula (University of Montana) have strong literary communities, while Davis (University of California) and Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina) have their aging activists. Cities like Austin, Tex.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Fargo, N.D., have developed thriving economies in part because software and research companies gravitate toward places with a large concentration of graduates.

College towns have cosmopolitan amenities (lectures, music, ethnic restaurants, libraries) but also an almost surreal degree of cultural cohesion — “ideologically inbred” communities where residents read, watch and vote for the same things, in the view of Bill Bishop, author of “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart,” published in May.

Blake Gumprecht, an assistant geography professor at the University of New Hampshire, calls them “small towns without the small-minded people.” In “The American College Town,” to be published in November, he compares the “academic archipelago” to mining or ski towns, where a single institution dominates the character of the entire community. (Providence, then, is “a city that is merely home to a college.”)

“There are very few other places like this where you can maintain the creativity and idealism you enjoyed in college,” Mr. Gumprecht says. He calls the college town “paradise for misfits.”

Graduates seem to find the following five towns difficult to leave.

DAVIS (pop. 60,964)

(UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS)

The Davis City Council has declared the town hate- and nuclear-free and a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. Street-lamp shields prevent glare, for better views of the stars, and the city built a $13,000 tunnel under a highway because endangered toads were being run over.

“The place gets you stuck like flypaper, and there are plenty of flies,” says Rob Roy, a 27-year-old substitute teacher from Sacramento who graduated from U.C. Davis in 2007 with a degree in English. He doubts there’s another place where he would feel as ideologically at home.

So Mr. Roy still lives near campus, in a 10-foot-by-12-foot room, and rides his bicycle to college house parties. (Drunken riders get B.U.I.’s — “biking under the influence” tickets.) He plays in a band that “sounds like Tom Waits if he tried to make pop music” and considers becoming a teacher, politician or writer.

“I guess if I knew there was gold in the hills outside of Davis, I might be more willing to hop out and enter the work force,” he says. “But I figure our economy is crumbling; I might as well just stay cool and not worry about it.”

PROVIDENCE (pop. 175,255)

(BROWN; RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN)

Freshly minted graduates support themselves (and their art projects) with part-time jobs like milling soap, making cheese or working as nannies for professors’ children.

They share cavernous spaces in converted 19th-century textile mills in working-class neighborhoods rapidly rising in value, often to the dismay of longtime residents.

“Providence used to be a place where graduates left immediately, but now it’s gotten to the point where people not affiliated with either university are moving here just to be near a young, creative community,” says Megan Hall, 26, a public radio reporter who graduated from Brown in 2004 and initially lived in a partially converted potato warehouse, where sacks of potatoes were routinely delivered to the building by forklift. “A lot of us can experiment with this really simple lifestyle. We’re not afraid of being poor.”

Ms. Hall still thinks about returning home to Portland, Ore. Most of her friends, she says, talk about leaving but never do. Last year, she and a friend made a radio documentary, “The Break Up Project Performance,” about the city’s incestuous dating pool, which begins with a teary-voiced woman complaining about all the times she runs into her former boyfriend.

“I go to get my morning coffee, and you’re there,” the woman says, sighing. “I see you in line at the grocery store, at the post office, bookstore, the record shop, on the opposite side of the street. Your friends, your flyers, your stupid [expletive] band. It’s all here, and everywhere, and it feels like I’m suffocating.”

ATHENS (pop. 111,580)

(UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA)

The success of former Athens bands like R.E.M., the B-52’s, Pylon and Neutral Milk Hotel has buoyed the dreams of a contingent of U.Ga. graduates who perform in one another’s living rooms and basements.

Mercer West, a 2004 graduate from suburban Atlanta, calls Athens a “creative neverland” and says most of his friends hung around so they could live cheaply and keep their bands together. Mr. West plays in five and has turned the bottom floor of his home, a converted warehouse, into a performance space and screen-printing shop, run by three other U.Ga. graduates. He describes Athens as a “little bohemian enclave where the line between college and the rest of your life becomes blurred.”

“I’m not one of those people who’s always talking about leaving,” says Mr. West, 26. “I realize there’s this whole stigma around the word ‘townie,’ even as I quickly turn into one.”

Athens is a difficult place to start a career; options are generally limited to waiting tables, teaching or working for the university. Mr. West says many of his friends “know they can fall back on their parents if anything bad happens.”

David Specht, 26, who rents Mr. West’s top floor, graduated from U.Ga. in 2003 with a degree in West African cinema and literature (“That’s pretty much saying: no jobs ever”). He managed an art-moving company in Brooklyn before moving back to Athens. Now a woodworker, he is learning to play the violin. In Brooklyn, he didn’t feel the same “creative electrical sparks.”

FARGO (pop. 90,056)

(NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY)

Over the last five years, the number of people employed here has grown by 13 percent, more than twice the national rate; 31 percent of the class of 2006 stayed in Fargo, where temperatures drop to 40 below. Many graduates are enticed by high-paying jobs at biotech and software companies, including a huge division of Microsoft.

“We’re in a golden era,” says Erin Ahneman, a St. Paul native who graduated from North Dakota State in 2001. “The university and the companies that employ its graduates are growing together.” When her husband, also a graduate, got a job in Fargo, she was reluctant to commit to her college town. Its hick-town reputation lingers (thanks, Coen brothers). The local newspaper reported on a graduation speaker at a Virgin-ia high school who called Fargo “the physical and spiritual symbol of what happens to you when you die inside.”

“Talk about someone basically spitting on your life,” says Mrs. Ahneman, 29, a sales representative at Microsoft. She likes the area so much now that “unless something very crazy happens, we’ll be here for the rest of our lives.”

The city has redeveloped its low-slung downtown, which is intersected by two Interstates and dotted with parking lots. Recent years have seen the construction of previously unheard-of amenities like sake bars, art galleries and a “bar mall” of theme saloons for barhopping without stepping outside.

CHAPEL HILL (pop. 49,919)

(UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA)

Graduates make money, get married and develop a taste for designer bedding and organic food. Diners begin charging $8 for a plate of eggs. House prices rise. The compact, leafy town that grew around U.N.C. has become one of the most expensive places to live in the state. Most of the university staff commutes.

“Sometimes we’re cursed by our own success,” says Mark Chilton, a 1993 graduate who stayed behind and is now mayor of Carrboro, about a mile from U.N.C. Living in a college town has gained “a new level of social acceptability,” he says.

“If you look at old graduation speeches, you find evidence of the traditional mentality that if you want to make it big, you have to go off and find work in the big city and move to the top of the ladder,” he adds. “My generation may be known for its slackers, but we’ve stopped accepting that as the correct definition of success.”

Tom Jensen, a 24-year-old Michigan native who graduated in 2006, wanted to live in Chapel Hill so badly that he commutes three hours a day to Raleigh for his job at a polling company. He pays $875 for a one-bedroom apartment and doesn’t consider Chapel Hill too upscale. “Anyone who’s been here longer than five years is locked into this idealized notion of what the town used to be,” he says, “and that’s probably just whatever it was like when they were seniors in college. Obviously, that’s when it was really perfect.”

Rachel Aviv teaches freshman writing at Columbia.