Higher education is an investment, and the Legislature this year approved more than $74 million in budget restorations for the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE), according to NSHE’s website.

Any investment of that scale begs the question, what’s the return? Are these institutions developing a workforce that will benefit Nevada, or just move elsewhere?

According to the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance 2022 Workforce Blueprint, 73.7% of recent graduates are employed in Nevada. But that figure can vary depending on field. Students in hospitality are more likely to stay in Las Vegas, for example, than students in engineering.

“When you do have any brain drain, it’s often because they have to go elsewhere to find opportunities. So you have to have a lot of opportunity within the state, as well,” says Eileen McGarry, executive director for UNLV Career Services.

She says an estimated 55% of STEM and engineering students stay in the state after graduation. “If they’re going out of state, there was much more prevalence in California [and] Washington,” McGarry says.

And according to a press release from the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED), “Talent in science and engineering is scarcer to begin with in our state, but also there is also a much lower retention rate within a year after graduation, compared to other fields of study.”

To get more engineers to stay in the state after graduation, UNLV received $4 million from the GOED for a program that helps students obtain paid internships with startup and tech companies. The StepUp & StartUp Internship Program launched in February and now includes 28 students—mostly juniors and seniors and some master’s students—in computer science, computer engineering or electrical engineering, earning $18 per hour in paid internships.

“The more internships our students get, the more likely they’ll be successful when they leave UNLV,” says College of Engineering internship coordinator Alejandro Chacon. “Now, because these are all local businesses, these businesses already are considering, right when the students graduate, already hiring them.”

Pushing and incentivizing internships is just one strategy among many that local colleges use to try to retain talent. The Weekly also spoke with officials at the College of Southern Nevada and Nevada State University to find out what’s being done to slow the brain drain.

“Many of these experiences, especially in the Career Technical Education space, STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics], certainly the skilled trades from HVAC to welding to automotive to health sciences, they all have on-the-job training components to the curriculum,” says Dr. James McCoy, College of Southern Nevada’s vice president of academic affairs. “It manifests in a few different ways. In the health science field … every one of these programs has a clinical requirement. … From a workforce development perspective, it’s key.”

Clinicals are one example of “on-the-job training” that ultimately should encourage students to stay in the state after they earn their degree, McCoy says. “In the context of health sciences … they’re required to spend X number of hours every week under the supervision of a faculty member. And they’re actually on the floor at the hospital or at the clinic, with real patients. … They’re connected with the local industry with real jobs right here in Southern Nevada,” he says.

As for apprenticeships, local unions can get a student’s foot in the door even before graduation, making it more likely they’ll stay in Nevada, McCoy says. “If a student is engaged in construction trade, and they’re connected in a pathway for apprenticeships, now they’re earning and learning at the same time—they’re being supported by their union.”

Nevada State University interim provost and executive vice president Dr. Tony Scinta agrees that making connections with local employers prior to graduation is key to retaining graduates.

“[The School of] Education works pretty hard to force strong connections with schools in the area,” he says. “[These] partnerships can serve multiple objectives. One of them is that you forge a connection in familiarity, that can increase your likelihood that that continues after a student graduates.

“It also gives us good information from the partner,” he continues, “about what they would like to see in their prospective employees.”

Knowing which jobs are needed

“That’s something we try to do in our program development—examine statistics and information and perspectives from employers on what’s really needed,” Scinta says.

In recent years, Nevada State University has added programs in speech pathology and data science. “We talked to area employers like MGM and Switch and the Southern Nevada Health District. And they all reinforced this idea that, yes, if you had people who graduated with this knowledge and skill set, we can hire them.”

Scinta says 81% of Nevada State University grads go on to work in the state. And they’re going into diverse, growing fields, along with fields experiencing shortages, like nursing and education.

“I think part of our success with students staying in Nevada after they graduate is that we do try to build programs that lead to viable career pathways in the region,” Scinta says. “Education and nursing … are two of the biggest [programs] at our institution. And of course, they address some pretty significant shortages in the region.”

At the College of Southern Nevada, new grant funding from the GOED will help expand advanced manufacturing and computer Information Technology programs. McCoy says before CSN applied for the funding, it provided “no less than 10 local businesses and corporations that said, ‘If you build it, we will be waiting for the students on the other end.’”

Then in June, the GOED announced more than $2.8 million for the College of Southern Nevada to expand instructional capacity and support for new certificate and degree pathways in advanced manufacturing, and to expand training access and capacity in computer information technologies. The announcement also mentions 12 Nevada employers looking to hire graduates in these programs.

Creating opportunities for graduates

Asked how to keep talent in the state after graduation, Lauri Perdue, vice chair for the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance (LVGEA), says the answer is a little complicated. “The first thing that comes to my mind is, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? How do we retain those students who are pursuing specific degree programs and skills in areas that we don’t have businesses and organizations to support?” Perdue asks.

About 35% of businesses that don’t come to Southern Nevada aren’t here because they perceive deficiencies in our education and workforce, she adds. “And we want to counteract that.”

“If we want our students and our youth to grow skill sets in things like health care and STEM, we need to have places for them to go to work. Those two things really have to build in a parallel manner: We need the opportunities in the Valley, just at the same time that we’re building the workforce with our youth.”

To build opportunities for employers and graduates, the LVGEA has established a talent pipeline council comprising leaders in economic development, private and public higher education, Workforce Connections and the charter and public K-12 school systems. The first meeting is scheduled for October.

Perdue, who also serves as the National Workforce Director for the University of Phoenix, says such coordination is necessary to create opportunities for graduates in the state.

“As a higher education system, we have not had a platform [where] we can all come together and work to build those opportunities and build that workforce together as an ecosystem. … We want to have a nexus for workforce and economic development. We want to be able to map the skills that workforce opportunities call for right now. … But we also want to be meeting needs of organizations that haven’t even come here yet,” Perdue says.

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