These are the top 15 U.S. cities to launch your career

Where can you start a career in sports marketing? A few months ago, Purdue senior Colin Burns was pursuing minor-league baseball opportunities as far as 900 miles from his northwest Indiana campus. Then he discovered his best opportunity was just an hour's drive away.

This summer, Burns will begin work with the NFL's Indianapolis Colts, working in the events department and handling some social media duties. His pay won’t be lavish, but the job connects him with a top-tier employer. It's a start. And it keeps him close to his friends and family.

"I've always considered myself a Midwest kind of guy," Burns explains. "I'll know people in Indy. I think it's a great city." Besides, relatives in the Indianapolis suburbs will help him out with housing, making his paychecks stretch a lot further.

America's Class of 2020 didn’t ask for a chance to start careers in the midst of a nationwide pandemic and 14.9% unemployment. But this spring’s college graduates are pressing ahead anyway. Now a new analysis by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team turns the spotlight on career opportunities in 15 U.S. cities that are especially well-suited for new grads — and anyone else looking to kick-start their career.

This Top 15 list spans nearly the entire country, from Phoenix, Ariz. in the west to Durham, N.C., in the east. The Sunbelt scores well, but the most surprising strength comes in the Midwest, which claims the nine top spots. St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Indianapolis lead the rankings.

Each city on the list offers a compelling blend of affordable housing -- plus well-paying jobs that are within reach for recent grads. Leading job titles include software engineers, registered nurses and salespeople. Other common jobs include teachers, administrative assistants, project managers, analysts, research assistants, consultants and project engineers. The analysis weaves together LinkedIn data on local jobs with comprehensive Zillow Rentals data on housing costs.

What you won’t find on this list are the traditional coastal job magnets -- New York, the Washington, D.C. area, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Those cities may still offer some of the highest starting salaries, but their sky-high rents mean income doesn’t stretch nearly as far. 

In top-ranked St. Louis, for example, annual gross pay in the types of jobs that recent grads are likely to land is just a touch over $60,000. Typical rent averages $11,900 a year, or slightly less than $1,000 a month. That makes St. Louis a strikingly affordable city in which to start a career, with rent consuming just 19.7% of gross income.

Rachel Hafley, an entrepreneurial studies and business major at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., has started hunting for housing in St. Louis, where she plans to make a career in event management after earning her degree in July. She says she’s surprised to find that within her housing budget of $800 to $1,200 a month, she can find two-bedroom apartments and even townhouses, as well as the classic new grad’s one-bedroom apartment.

“The cost of living is very reasonable,” she says. Hafley already has experience running events for sporting-clays shooters, and she’s impressed with St. Louis event-management opportunities that extend from children’s hospitals to the corporate circuit.

Everything can be more challenging in coastal locations such as the metro New York area, where rent will chew up 36.9% of new graduates’ likely earnings. San Francisco is even worse, at 39.3%. New grads might be excited by San Francisco’s lofty, tech-driven salaries that average $95,500 a year. Those bigger paychecks become a mirage, however, with metro San Francisco rent averaging more than $3,000 a month. 

To make ends meet, new grads in high-cost cities are likely to face unpleasant choices. Some may end up splitting tiny apartments with roommates; others may fall behind their cheaper-city counterparts financially, once they are done paying the landlord.

The LinkedIn/Zillow analysis doesn’t explicitly take into account the degree to which pandemic-related concerns are reshaping new graduates’ career plans, but in interviews with students and their college advisers, it’s clear that a lot of rethinking is going on. 

Moving 1,000 miles or more to an unfamiliar city may seem exciting when crowded restaurants are thriving, waterfront parties are a way of life, and the world’s best bands are coming to town to perform.. Right now, though, all those delights aren’t happening. It’s hard to know how quickly -- or how dependably -- the classic big-city scene will re-emerge. 

“A lot of students and graduates are deciding that they want to work somewhere that’s closer to their families,” says Lori Sparger, chief operating officer of Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts. “They don’t want to be as far away. Even the idea of being a three-hour plane flight from home is chancier, if airplane service can be disrupted.”

Methodology

LinkedIn data scientist Brian Xu identified nearly 3 million U.S. LinkedIn positions starting in 2017-2019 most immediately following a member’s maximum educational attainment. Each “career starter” positions was associated with its job title, geography, and total median salary by U.S. metro, as reported by LinkedIn Salary. The average of median salaries for all “starter” positions is calculated in each U.S. metro and matched with the average of Zillow Rentals’ annual median housing rent data by U.S. metro from 2017-2019, includes all rental types and sizes. U.S. cities are ranked by lowest rent to salary ratio with a threshold of at least 15,000 “starter” hires over the 3 year span.