Sierra Perrine is originally from Arizona, but wanted to leave the state for a new experience during college.
“I always joked growing up that I wanted to live somewhere green and fluffy, and I describe Alabama as that,” Perrine said.
Four years after graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in engineering, the 26-year-old said she’s surprised to still be in Birmingham, putting down roots. One big reason she’s sticking around is her job. And she’s not alone.
This year, Birmingham topped payroll processor ADP’s annual list of best U.S. metro areas for young college graduates. The city rose from fifth place last year, surpassing places like San Jose, California, and Raleigh, North Carolina. The rankings are based on three data points: hiring rates for people in their 20s with job titles typically requiring a bachelor’s degree; median wages for those employees; and cost of living.
Perrine is now a virtual design and construction manager for Brasfield & Gorrie, one of a few large, Birmingham-based construction firms that are building major projects across the South and the country. Her job is to integrate architects’ creative visions with mechanical engineers’ practical concerns about where things like ductwork and electrical wiring should go.
Perrine interned with Brasfield & Gorrie while in college, and the company hired her after she graduated. She had other offers, some with higher salaries, but chose to stay in Birmingham.
“Birmingham was so affordable, and it's what I knew I wanted to do,” she said. The next year, she bought a house.
“If I look at what I would have been able to get in Scottsdale versus here, it's drastically different,” Perrine said. “My biggest goal was to just own something, but it was an extra bonus that I got to have a nice, well-sized house in a comfortable community.”
Industries including healthcare, banking, manufacturing, construction and tech are all expanding in Birmingham. And Alabama’s largest universities are pulling in significant numbers of out-of-state students, many of whom, like Perrine, stay after graduation.
They’re helping fill a gap economists have long foreseen between job-growth projections in Alabama and the number of workers with the education and skills needed for those jobs, said Tom Spencer, senior research associate with the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama.
“We are importing a lot of talent from around the country,” Spencer said. “We have strong demand for new employees and yet not an oversupply.”
Spencer said that as demand for workers grows, industries are having to increase wages. In Birmingham, median annual wages for recent graduates rose more than 16% over the last 12 months, according to ADP.
And when you combine relatively high wages with low cost of living, you get 23-year-olds buying houses in an economy where many of their peers are pessimistic about the possibility of ever becoming homeowners.
While numerous industries are providing well-paying jobs to young professionals in Birmingham, healthcare and biotechnology are primary drivers of the city’s hiring and wage growth, said Dr. Ray Watts, president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The university occupies about 100 city blocks, and is both Birmingham’s biggest higher-education institution and the largest single employer in the state. That’s because it’s a well-funded research organization and also operates a massive healthcare network that includes multiple hospitals.
“We are one of the largest academic medical centers in America,” Watts said. “We are continually growing, so there are a lot of job opportunities.”
While data points like the amount of hiring are important, said Trevor Sutton, chief economic development officer for the Birmingham Business Alliance, quality-of-life factors are attracting young professionals to Birmingham as well. He points to James Beard Award-winning restaurants, concert venues that draw big-name acts, plentiful parks and green spaces and a thriving arts scene.
“They're like, ‘This is what I really liked when I visited Atlanta or Nashville, but also I didn't like having to drive or wait in traffic for 40 minutes, getting from one place to another,’” Sutton said. “So I think that's been really resonating.”
Perrine said her commute to work from a nearby suburb and her travel time to just about anywhere she needs to go is 15 to 30 minutes.
Another thing the ADP data doesn’t gauge is the work government, business and community groups are putting into recruiting young people to the city, and developing and retaining those who start out in Birmingham.
One example is the Penny Games, which brings students from historically Black colleges and universities to Birmingham every year for a series of intellectual competitions. The three-day event also includes a job fair, and a major objective is to showcase the city as a place to start and grow a career.
Lyord Watson, founder and chief executive of the nonprofit Penny Foundation, said about 85% of last year’s participants had never been to Birmingham.
“I like to frame Birmingham as a place you can come in and try great ideas out and see if you can get it off the ground,” he said. “We had good feedback.”
Watson said he heard from participants who’d never considered Birmingham before say they wouldn't mind learning more and coming back to visit again.
The overall mission of the Penny Foundation is to use innovation and technology to narrow economic disparity in Birmingham. And that’s not a minor lift.
Because while Birmingham might offer ample opportunities to those toting certain degrees, it’s not that kind of place for everyone. About a quarter of the city’s residents live in poverty, while some of its neighborhoods and bordering suburbs display astonishing wealth.
Often, wealth inequality in the metro area breaks down along racial lines. The city of Birmingham is about 70% Black, and more than 60 years after Birmingham made history during the Civil Rights Movement, residential areas and schools are still mostly segregated, not by law but by practice.
Erika Dix, manager of workforce and talent development for the city, said Birmingham is using federal grant money and its own funds to funnel natives into the lucrative careers the area’s employers are generating.
“We've used it for paying for tuition, childcare, housing, transportation,” Dix said. “If it pertains to how this individual is going to leave their home and go into the workforce, we've been able to use these federal funds to help assist them in that regard.”
But Dix notes that people shouldn’t feel like this is a handout.
“Poverty is a barrier within itself, and so if we can't help those individuals fight that systemic issue, then we're not doing our job as a government,” she said.
Dix said city government also works closely with Birmingham’s major employers to know what positions they have available now and what will be available 10 years from now. The city then works with community colleges to prepare curriculum that meets employer demands, and also partners with universities and employers to provide full-tuition scholarships to graduates of Birmingham’s public school system.
Once they make it to college, those locals can join peers from across the country in programs like Fuel Alabama, which provides networking opportunities for any college student doing a summer internship.
At a recent kickoff event at one of Birmingham’s hip breweries in a reclaimed industrial area near the city’s center, more than half of about 70 interns were from out of state. But locals were there, too.
Morgan Escott-Holmes is from Birmingham and attends the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa. She said Atlanta and other big cities are options for launching her marketing career, but she's made connections with employers and plans to start in Birmingham.
“I feel as though foundation-wise, I will be here in Birmingham, mainly because my family is here and because I grew up here, but I just feel as if, with the community that I built, that I just would want to be here,” she said.
Another student at the event, Luke Binet, grew up in the Birmingham suburb of Homewood and is attending college in Boston, Massachusetts. He also said he can see himself coming back to Birmingham.
“I've had the privilege to travel a lot of places, but Birmingham, you can't beat the affordability with it,” Binet said. “It's really great living conditions and really awesome opportunities for people right out of college. And also, just I really like the city itself.”
Choices like that could help Birmingham reduce its poverty rate and keep the supply of college-educated workers flowing.
