When Colgate University seniors look for jobs, they hear about hundreds of openings in New York City and almost none in places such as Syracuse, Albany or Buffalo.

Employers in those cities have jobs but they rarely list them with Colgate's Center for Career Services or visit campus, said Ursula Olender, the center's director.

It's not just Colgate: Colleges and employers in Upstate New York could do much more to keep graduates here, said Kevin McAvey, a Colgate graduate and Cornell University graduate student who is starting a new initiative to address the problem.

The Upstate Foundation aims to push college graduates to stay in the region by increasing job advertising, giving graduates who take jobs in the region $1,000 and supporting efforts to revitalize neighborhoods targeted to young professionals.

"Upstate New York is not a dead region," McAvey said. "That's one of the biggest myths out there -- that there aren't jobs. We should encourage people to apply to those jobs and change their perceptions."

McAvey met this month with officials from the Metropolitan Development Association in Syracuse to coordinate his plans with the current efforts to address Central New York's brain drain problem, which include an internship program and an active group of young professionals called 40 Below.

"We think there may be some ideas that Kevin has that might address gaps and ongoing challenges," said Frank Caliva, director of talent initiatives for the MDA.

An earlier study by the state and Cornell University found that Upstate had a net loss of 68,000 young adults between 1995 and 2000.

McAvey has registered his foundation with the state and said he hopes to finish the incorporation process this month.

The foundation will soon start working on raising money to fund its $1,000 fellowships and McAvey is talking to college career services staff so that he can start what he calls the Upstate Connect initiative.

He wants employers to list job openings on the Upstate Foundation's Web site and have a weekly list of openings sent to career offices and then forwarded to students.

At Syracuse University's Center for Career Services, 16 percent of the current postings for full-time jobs are within 50 miles of Syracuse, said center Director Mike Cahill. His staff has been working to boost that percentage for the last five years, he said.

"It's a challenge," Cahill said. "Particularly for students who come to Syracuse or Cornell from somewhere else. They really aren't looking to stay."

Olender has met with McAvey and said she supports his plan as a way of tackling an ingrained image problem that discourages both students and employers.

"I believe that our soon-to-be alumni do not see these communities as places offering the sort of community they desire," she said. "Employers are hesitant to invest time and resources into recruiting at our school since there is often a lack of interest."

Other programs planned by the Upstate Foundation in addition to the online employment clearinghouse are:

–The Upstate Fellowship Program would give 100 awards annually for $1,000 each to students who accept jobs in the region. That amount should help cover the costs of deposits on an apartment or other practical living expenses, McAvey said.

–The Shake Upstate Initiative would help coordinate local, state and regional efforts that target neighborhood gentrification. These neighborhoods, with stores, restaurants and homes targeted to young professionals, would help retain young people who take jobs in the area, McAvey said.

McAvey, 25, grew up in Long Island and chose Colgate for college because he thought the campus was beautiful. He left Central New York to get a master's degree in public policy from Georgetown University. A year ago, he returned to Cornell for a master's program in applied economics.

"D.C. is great and cities are wonderful, but I wanted to come back to Upstate," he said.

McAvey said it is challenging to lure other Upstate graduates here, partly because many are intent on heading to the city considered to be a best fit for their field, such as investment banking in New York City or software engineering in the San Francisco area.

Others pick a city because it is familiar, there is a pipeline there for their school's alumni, their friends are headed there, the quality of life or the expectation that it has jobs in their field, he said. A lot of these are perceptions rather than facts, but they help students make decisions.

"Graduating students have a thousand choices to make," he said. "I want them to make up their own minds on a playing field not determined by yesterday's results, but by what can happen tomorrow."

Return to Top

Welcome to college. Your first assignment: Register to vote.

Politics is perhaps unavoidable for students arriving on campus during a major presidential race. But college administrators and student organizers are supersizing the efforts this year to encourage them to cast their ballots.

"Orientation is a huge opportunity to register new voters … [and it] sends a great message … that civic engagement matters if one of the first things [students] are asked to do is register to vote," says Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the New Voters Project, an initiative of Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups).

Many campuses are going beyond registration drives in an attempt to turn Election '08 into the educational opportunity of a lifetime:

•First-year students at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia visited the National Constitution Center during their summer orientation. This week, they'll talk about "Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression," by Spencer Overton.

•At Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., an administrator envisions a "march of the absentee ballots," with students decked out in political regalia walking en masse to the post office to send votes back home. Also, students of different political stripes are planning events this fall to encourage political dialogue.

•During orientations at Loyola University Chicago, 70 new students signed up to be "equipment managers" at polling stations this November. They'll join several hundred upperclassmen being trained to set up and monitor voting machines.

•At Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., incoming students have read up on the "millennial generation" and politics this summer. Orientation included a lively presentation by political scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson and discussions over dinner at faculty homes.

The class of 2012 is starting college amid major buzz over the influence of the youth vote. A record 6.5 million people under age 30 cast ballots in this year's presidential primaries and caucuses. It is the first time their vote has risen in three consecutive election cycles since the voting age shifted to 18 in 1971, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

Yet many of today's college students are either tuned out or are hungering for more channels for political engagement. In a report last year based on focus groups at 12 campuses, students "by and large were saying they didn't get enough opportunities to connect politics to their classes … and to talk about current issues," says CIRCLE director Peter Levine.

Adam Zimmermann hopes to fill such gaps at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. He's president of the campus's Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE), which has chapters at about 30 US colleges. "Civic awareness and participation … was a missing link," he says, "and we figured that this year was the year to kick off a different way at Colgate."

SAVE was planning to staff a computer lab for all students to visit during orientation last weekend. There, they could find out about deadlines for registering locally or casting absentee ballots. If they opted to fill out forms, Colgate would pay to mail them.

The hope is to "get away from the casual table in our student union…. We're trying to get something much more systematic and … ingrained in the culture," Mr. Zimmermann says.

"A lot of campuses are trying to get 100 percent participation," says Libby May, a coordinator of the Your Vote, Your Voice project, which provides information to campuses nationwide through a website.

One hundred percent participation might be a tall order, especially among students navigating dorm life and midterms for the first time. "I'm excited about voting, but that's one of the last things on most people's minds right now," says Patrick Szawara, who's starting his first classes at Wake Forest.

Ms. Jamieson's lecture at Wake Forest "hit the nail on the head" when it comes to the millennial generation, Mr. Szawara says. In the group discussions, "we were talking about how we can't trust (a) the media, and (b) our politicians, so that's why we're always searching for more information on the Internet."

Campuses are starting to tap into students' penchant for new technology and social networking. New Voters Project volunteers will ask students to remind friends to register through a text message that links them to www.StudentVote.org.

~~a href="http://www.Ning.com"/~~Wheaton College has set up a one-stop website for voter education and registration. In a series of events that students will help plan over the next few months, the key is to "model a postpartisan or bipartisan conversation," says Vereene Parnell, associate dean for service, spirituality, and social responsibility. With a generation that's grown up watching a "totally partisan Washington," she says, it takes effort to "resurrect the idea that … we get smarter if we engage respectfully with the people who disagree with us."

Earlier this year, Wheaton's College Democrats and College Conservatives came together to watch Super Tuesday returns. "That was probably our riskiest enterprise to date. No blood was shed," Dean Parnell says with a laugh, "but there was a tussle over the remote."

Return to Top

It was a feat she couldn't even imagine 14 years ago.

Ellen Percy Kraly had just undergone surgery to stop the breast cancer that had invaded her body. In her recovery, she and her family vacationed on Mount Rainier in Washington state, one of the country's highest peaks.

"I looked at the mountain and thought, 'I'll never be in a situation where I could do something like this,' " she said. "I didn't know what the future held for me."

Nearly a decade and a half later, the 58-year-old Colgate University professor climbed to the mountain's peak - a height of 14,411 feet - with a group that included her son, Jim, to raise money for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

She was the oldest person in her climbing party by "at least 25 years," she said with a laugh. Near the top, she got lightheaded and feared she'd have to turn back.

But the Hamilton resident soldiered on and reached the mountain's summit, where she and her fellow climbers waved prayer flags in honor of women whose lives had been cut short by breast cancer. It was her son's 29th birthday.

"It was a very moving experience," she said. "It had looked so large in my imagination. To have done it - it was something that meant a lot to me personally."

Kraly said beating cancer is a lot like climbing mountains - both empowering and humbling.

"It caused me to face things," she said. "We are all touched by disease, by health challenges. It's about how we rise to support ourselves, to support each other."

Return to Top