Graduate students interested in an academic career after graduation day have often been told they need to be open to moving somewhere they may not want to live. This advice is because of how hard it is to get a tenure-track professor position.
These days, this advice may be less relevant as graduate students are increasingly pursuing and ending up in careers outside of academia.
Where graduate students want to settle post-graduation has potential consequences for communities and states across the country that depend more and more on a steady stream of skilled workers to power their economies. Locations seen as undesirable may struggle to attract and retain the next generation of scientists, engineers, professors and other professions filled by today’s graduate students.
We are sociologists who are examining some of the factors that influence graduate students’ educational and career paths as part of a research project supported by the National Science Foundation. In March 2025 we distributed a survey to a sample of U.S.-based graduate students in five natural and social science disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology.
As part of our survey, we asked students to identify states they would prefer to live in and places where they would be unwilling to go. To some extent, our findings match some past anecdotes and evidence about the varying number of applications received for academic positions across different states or regions.
But little data has directly assessed students’ preferences, and our survey also provides some evidence that some states’ policies are having a negative impact on their ability to attract highly educated people.
Most preferred, most unwilling
For our study, we built our sample from the top 60 graduate programs for each of the five disciplines based on rankings from U.S. News and World Report. We received responses from nearly 2,000 students. Almost all of these students – 98%, specifically – are pursuing Ph.D.s in their respective fields.
As part of our survey, we asked students to identify locations where they would “prefer” to live and also those where they would be “unwilling” to live after finishing their graduate program. For each of these questions, we presented students with a list of all states along with the option of “outside of the United States.”
Just looking at the overall percentages, California tops the list of preferred places, with 49% of all survey-takers stating a preference to live there, followed by New York at 45% and Massachusetts with 41%.
On the other hand, Alabama was selected most often as a state students said they’d be unwilling to move to, with 58% declaring they wouldn’t want to live there. This was followed by Mississippi and Arkansas, both with just above 50% saying they’d be unwilling to move to either state.
Clusters of preference
While the two lists in many respects appear like inversions of one another,…
