Young job seekers may want to swap New York City for the South

College seniors often hope to move out of the graduation stage into their first big-kid job in New York City, Washington, DC, or Los Angeles.

But delve deeper into one of these cities, and you’ll discover an important truth: In a low-wage, low-cost, slow-moving labor market and a high unemployment rate among recent college graduates, New York City’s job opportunities are falling, and the city’s unemployment rate, at 5.4% nationally, is well above the national level. And that’s in a market where the average rental watch is around $3,700.

The picture looks most promising in the far south, where labor markets are strong, affordability is better, and population growth is booming.

“If you’re not considering the South, you’re not giving yourself a good chance to find something that will help you rise to the top and start making a name for yourself,” said Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics in the Americas. “You have to take Mzansi seriously as a place to work if you haven’t taken it seriously yet.”

There is a growing body of economic research and standards to support that sentiment. While San Francisco leads the pack in LinkedIn’s ranking of entry-level opportunities by city, Orlando, Atlanta, Charleston, Tampa, Austin, and Nashville all make up the top ten markets. ADP’s list of the top metropolitan areas for college education — which looks at rental rates, wages, and affordability — also leans south, placing Birmingham and Tampa above San Jose. New York City, which ranks at the bottom of ADP’s top 10, is just below Charlotte.

States that saw the largest percentage gains in job growth year-over-year in federal government statistics from May are also clustered below the Mason-Dixon line. Although Nevada saw the largest increase, North Carolina, West Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas were among the biggest gainers, with North Carolina alone adding more positions than New York, despite the entire state having slightly more than half the city’s population.

Visa Business and Economic Insights, meanwhile, found that the South accounts for 58% of all jobs added between 2019 and 2025 as the region’s population continues to grow. Incomes there have been rising as the labor market “shifts to higher-skilled, higher-paying sectors,” Visa noted in its 2025 forecast.

With employment in recent years concentrated in health care, hospitality and local government services, the job market in the South is in a position to benefit from snowbirds and the services that support them, Kantenga said. Retirees who love the South create their own economic momentum, while the region attracts manufacturing and technology jobs.

“We are still seeing more than 20% employment below pre-pandemic levels,” said Kantenga. “There’s not a lot of momentum in the market. A lot of the jobs being added are being added in health care. There’s certainly a disproportionate amount of it being added in the South.”

Still, strong job markets and attractive programs don’t mean grads will flock to the South. Class of 2025 data from Handshake shows that seniors who graduated that year submitted the most job applications in New York City and Chicago.

Everything goes South

The “southward trend” has been going on for at least a decade, Kantenga said, although the epidemic is accelerating it. Although population growth slowed in many states between July 2024 and July 2025 as immigration slowed, for example, many of the fastest-growing states were in southeastern states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, Census Bureau data shows.

“We see that over the next 30 years, the Southeast is likely to see more population growth than any other region of the country,” Joseph Von Nessen, a research economist at the University of South Carolina, told Yahoo Finance.

Just last year, data from Visa Business and Economic Insights showed that the South accounted for 41% of job growth, despite accounting for 38% of total employment.

“The increase in population means that there are many employers who will be attracted to this region because there is a large number of people who can work for us, and the increase in population means that employers want to find a place where there are many people to work,” said Von Nessen.

Companies are also relocating their headquarters, with the Dallas-Fort Worth area gaining 11 new HQs by 2025 “from other high-cost metro areas such as Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York and Chicago,” according to a CBRE report. The metropolitan areas of Miami, Austin, and Charlotte also added HQ relocations.

Michael Toma, an economics professor at Georgia Southern University, noted that the Savannah region has attracted Hyundai’s largest EV and hybrid vehicle plant, which, when it opened last year, was expected to bring 8,500 jobs to the site by 2031. Yamaha Motor’s US operations, meanwhile, announced this year that its headquarters, Atlanta, Ganne, will once again return to Atlanta, California, will once again return to Atlanta, Ganne. place.

“The economy of the South has diversified, it has developed a lot in technology in the last 20 to 30 years, there are many opportunities for people in science and other high-paying job markets,” said Toma.

Attracting young workers

Jerry Parrish, chief economist at the Metro Atlanta Chamber, pointed to his city’s position at the top of WalletHub’s rankings of the best places to start a career this year.

“We’ve actually grown by over 10,000 jobs in the last four months,” he said, although it was soft last year.

Like the rest of the country, hiring has started in the health care sector, but “we’ve signed a lot of companies to expand their businesses here or relocate their headquarters here, and now those kinds of things are paying off,” Parrish added. (Morgan Stanley, which wants to build a new regional headquarters, is weighing Dallas or Alpharetta, in the Atlanta metro area, as two options, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

Another district, Trevor Sutton, chief economic development officer for the Birmingham Business Alliance, said Birmingham has changed a lot since he was a child growing up in what was once Alabama’s largest city. (The top spot has since been taken by Huntsville, which has seen significant growth, thanks in part to its growing aerospace and defense sectors.)

The Birmingham metro area tops ADP’s ranking of top markets for freshmen this year, with the confidential processor citing a “strong hiring rate of 2.8 percent” and median annual salaries for recent graduates rising more than 16% to nearly $59,000.

It helps that downtown Birmingham now feels like a “hub and magnet for the region,” Sutton says, rather than a nine-to-five hotspot. Birmingham is also the host city for the statewide Fuel Alabama program, which connects college students with opportunities and the community during their summer studies.

“What it does is help (students) expand their networks outside of the group of friends they had when they went to college, but it also exposes them to different companies and opportunities here in Birmingham,” Sutton said. “Let’s say that even if they didn’t like where they were doing their summer internship, they met two or three people from two or three different companies that they wouldn’t have thought about.

That could help keep them in Birmingham in the long run.

“My goal for my team is: We will make Birmingham the No. 1 summer internship destination in the Southeast,” Sutton said. “If we can get them here, our top employers will give them a great experience; we’ll make sure they get a great experience after 5pm; and they’ll have a strong network.”

Emma Ockerman is a journalist who talks about the economy and operations of Yahoo Finance. You can find him at emma.ockerman@yahooinc.com.

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