Are you one of the millions of college graduates who received a newly minted bachelor’s degree this year? And are you now ready to put to good use? Then you’d be doing yourself a favor by learning to enjoy NASCAR and appreciate the vinegary notes of eastern North Carolina pulled pork, according to two new studies. The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Research Triangle region of North Carolina is among the best places for recent college graduates to live, according to the payroll provider ADP and real-estate digital marketplace Zumper. It joins the likes of such cities as Austin, Baltimore, Atlanta, Charlotte, Detroit, Denver, Columbus, Seattle, Washington, DC, and Phoenix in having the right combination of housing affordability, median income, and employment, as well as factors like the number of singles, educated young people, and restaurants.
“Raleigh’s middling affordability pairs well with wages above the 80th percentile, and it has the best hiring rates for likely new graduates of all metros studied,” the ADP study said. None of the top picks in either study surprised Christina DePasquale, associate professor of economics at John Hopkins Carey Business School. “If you’re a recent college graduate or someone in your early career and searching for finance- or tech-related jobs, these cities can provide them the same job opportunities as larger cities but with more housing affordability,” she says. “People are feeling the pinch in their wallet. Some people describe the housing market as completely shutting out young people these days.”
ADP’s study factored in each city’s annual hiring rate for 20-somethings, median annual wages ending in April 2024 and each metropolitan area’s consumer price index, using its own data from 4 million people between the ages of 20 and 29 working for 27,000 companies. It attempted to balance affordability with wages, noting that a city like Cleveland was more affordable than 89 percent of the cities it considered, but that its wages were only in the 35th percentile—implying that some cities are good for maintaining a life but not necessarily for building wealth.
“What a lot of these [top-ranked] cities have in common is not only rental affordability, but [their status] as places where, if you did want to buy a house, that is certainly more feasible than in the traditional cities we’d associate with higher numbers of tech jobs, higher numbers of health care jobs, more finance jobs,” DePasquale says.
Zumper, on the other hand, worked in similar datasets, including unemployment rates, median income and the median cost of rent for a one-bedroom apartment, but also included social and cultural factors like the population of people ages 18 to 34, the number of 25-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees, how many people were single, and how many restaurants there were per capita.
“It’s going to be correlated,” DePasquale says. “Typically, places that have good job prospects and good job opportunities are also going to be places with a good social scene. Part of having a good social scene means that there are jobs available in the area. It can make the difference for recommending someplace like Austin or San Francisco, where we know there are plenty of good job opportunities but that might not be super affordable. If you factor in the quality of life in terms of the social scene, entertainment, cultural experiences and top-notch educational institutions nearby, that makes a city you can comfortably recommend to people.”