Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn wants students to stay in the area after they graduate.
He wants to stop the “brain drain” and see the city compete with Austin, Texas and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. in terms of educated minds. The city can be hip and progressive, he said, and USF students should stick around after graduating to make it so.
We say, OK, Mr. Mayor, just as long as you give us something to stay for.
Tampa Bay isn’t a place that a lot of people think about when they want to settle down and start a career and a family. There are the obvious reasons: heat, retirees, tourists, the ever-present threat of a cockroach infestation. But the details say more than the tropes.
Unemployment in the bay area is still at a stagnant 11 percent, down from a peak of 12.6 percent in November 2010, but relatively unchanged since mid-2009. Cities like St. Paul, Minn.; Austin, Texas and Boston are more attractive to graduates. They simply offer lower unemployment rates—6.7 percent, 7.3 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively—and have a diverse range of industries with a relatively low cost of living. Even Detroit, Mich., the place where once thriving industries go to die, made a list as the fourth easiest city to find a job in the United States.
And then there’s the matter of Florida’s education system. The state desperately needs to overhaul its comprehensive testing program. Schools that perform well on these tests get more state money, while schools that perform poorly might see funding decreases. It’s a broken system, and it shows. Only 17 percent of Florida high school graduates are ready for higher education, according to ACT scores.
Why would we want to live in a place where our children have such poor odds?
It’s not that bay area unemployment, or its shoddy education system, is Buckhorn’s fault. The Tampa mayor inherited an ugly situation, and has made some major moves to fix it. Appointing a Deputy Mayor for Economic Opportunity, creating incentive packages to bring high tech industries to the area, and calling for the development of “New Urbanism”—walkable, compact, mixed-use cities—are all great moves that could pay big dividends for the city in the future.
And the state is getting tougher with its education system with the implementation of a set of nationwide standards that aim to bring the U.S. in line with better systems in places like Finland and China.
But really, neither of these concerns are Tampa Bay’s biggest problem. You can find a bad education system and a high unemployment rate in 100 other cities in the United States. There’s nothing really that wrong with Tampa Bay. But there’s nothing really right with it either. And therein lies the problem.
What is Tampa known for? Conan O’Brien may have inadvertently summed it up when the Rays beat his beloved Red Sox to take the wild card spot in the MLB last month. “I’m sure Tampa is a fine place to live, if you’re a mosquito,” he said. And that’s the crux of the issue.
Tampa is known for tourists, retirees and 100 percent humidity. As Buckhorn and other state leaders work to fix the economy and the education system, they should keep in mind that most people see Florida as a place where old people go to die in the warmth, and work to update that image. As graduates, we’re looking for other educated youth and the birth of opportunities, not retirement homes and bereavement.
Give us something to believe in, Mayor Buckhorn, and we’ll stay.
