Governor JB Pritzker wants us to celebrate because Illinois added 16,000 residents last year.

“Illinois recorded its third consecutive year of population growth, as the state remains focused on strengthening the factors that help people choose to stay and build their lives here,” the governor told us recently. “That’s why we are focused on making long-term investments in education, public safety, and economic opportunity — so families can raise their kids here, workers can build careers, and entrepreneurs can start and grow businesses across Illinois.” 

But one year, in which 11,000 more births than deaths accounted for most of Illinois’s growth, does not a growing state make. Since the 2020 Census, Illinois is one of six states that have lost population, along with California, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, and New York. In that time, our population decreased by 0.7 percent. Meanwhile, Texas, which added 391,000 people last year, has jumped by 7 percent. Even worse, we’re losing young people at a faster rate than any state. 

“The latest data on Illinois’ population trends shows the state losing more people 18 and under at a faster rate than any other state,” according to a Governing magazine analysis. “Illinois’ population is growing older with fewer working age people than before.”

Illinois’s difficulties in retaining young people can be seen at the college level. Illinois has the fourth-lowest rate of student migration (those coming into the state) in the U.S. For every .51 students who entered the state for college, one left. In 2022, 18,369 students came to Illinois for a college education, and 35,884 left. Once they leave, there’s a good chance they won’t come back. (In-state costs at the University of Illinois in Champaign top out at $35,000. There are better bargains to be found elsewhere.) The brain drain has been hitting Illinois’s lower-ranked, less well-funded  “directional” schools the hardest. Western Illinois University had 13,500 students in 2004, but is now down to 6,300. In the same period, Southern Illinois University dropped from 21,600 to 11,800.

“Regional schools have historically been a draw for students from working-class families, often students of color, students from rural areas, and those who may not otherwise go to college,” the Tribune reported. “But in recent years, the schools have had to compete against bigger name, out-of-state universities looking to attract Illinois high school graduates.”

Pritzker wants to make college in Illinois more affordable. He has suggested allowing community colleges to offer four-year degrees, but his proposal didn’t make it out of a House committee.

Growth has been slower than usual all over the country, because of a drop in immigration caused by the Trump Administration’s hostility to foreigners. That’s been especially unfriendly to Illinois, where 15.4 percent of the population is foreign born.

Illinois, especially its hinterlands, is a state that was well-designed for the industrial era, but not so much for what has come next. Decatur was once the headquarters of agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, but the company moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2014, because of the difficulty of attracting professional talent to a mid-sized city on the prairie. The blue-collar workforce remains, because of Decatur’s proximity to corn and soybean farms, but there’s less now to keep college graduates there. The city’s population has dropped from 93,939 in 1980 to 69,646. In Peoria, Caterpillar moved its headquarters to Chicago, then Irving, Texas. Peoria is also in decline, from 126,693 in 1970 to 113,150 today. These towns simply weren’t designed to hang on to their young people in a post-industrial economy.

“Our situation is typical of rural America,” John Jackson of Southern Illinois University’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute once told me. “Towns that used to be market towns are now drying up, disappearing. The possibilities of keeping young people there are difficult.”

Where are these small town college graduates going? They’re moving to Chicago, or they’re moving out of state. Chicago’s population has been stagnant, but its makeup has changed. The city has 2.7 million residents, down from its 1950 high of 3.6 million, and about the same as we were in 1990. But here, white-collar jobs have been replacing the blue-collar jobs that were lost during the factory shutdowns of the 1980s. (U.S. Steel South Works, which once employed 20,000 steelworkers, but closed in 1992, is about to become a quantum computing campus.) In Chicago, 43 percent of residents hold a bachelor’s degree, up from 32 percent in 2010. Our biggest losses have been in the Black community, which has been moving to the south suburbs or to Indiana. Indiana’s population has increased 2 percent since 2020, the largest gain of any Great Lakes state.

If Illinois can’t keep its young people, it’s never going to grow as a state again. We need to increase funding for education, and make it cheaper for working class families. We also need to, somehow, make our small towns more attractive to their ambitious young natives, by encouraging the growth of high-tech industries there. In the 1930s, when America was nearing the peak of its manufacturing might, Illinois had 27 congressmen. We now have 17, and will certainly lose another one, and possibly two, after the next census. That number will just keep decreasing if our kids keep leaving.