“They’re feeling like there’s no opportunities,” he said of students. “People feel like they have to leave the state for a big job at a place like, say, Amazon.”

Keller said people in other fields payday now loans Copperhill TN such as entertainment, feel compelled to leave Ohio to pursue their careers because the state’s film and entertainment industry simply isn’t large enough.

“Canton does a good job in recognizing people from different backgrounds,” Keller said. “But in some smaller cities, people feel trapped; they feel like they’re stuck in the city they grew up in.”

Vincent Roper Jr. wasn’t born in Ohio. The 19-year-old business management major was 11 years old when he moved from Vallejo, California, to Chillicothe. He is now a student at Kent State University at Tuscarawas.

Roper knows what would make him want to stay in Ohio. He said he would be lured by a good-paying job that offers opportunities to move up in the organization, and the opportunity to work for a diverse company that has strong core beliefs.

“If tax breaks were offered, that would be a huge factor in my decision of staying in Ohio,” he said. “If I earned scholarship money to continue my education into a master’s program, I would have no reason to look outside of Ohio.

“At the moment, I think that while Ohio is trying to keep college graduates here, there is more that they could do. Mostly having to do with offering financial help.”

“Many places in Ohio are not very diverse, so I believe that would be one reason I would consider leaving,” Roper said.

‘There’s all these bigger companies that are here, yet nobody knows.’

As a Pittsburgh native, Brady Warmbein thought for sure he would come to Ohio just for college and then leave.

His view of the state at the time, he said, was that it was great for getting your education, but not for much else.

“I thought straight out of the bat coming into college I was going to be in and out, four years, done, because I just thought it had nothing else to offer,” the 22-year-old said.

Now, the senior Kent State University marketing major is open to staying in the Buckeye state. But it’s more about the opportunity, he said, and less about which state he would call home.

Warmbein is interning for Sherwin Williams in Cleveland, a role that started as a summer gig but nine months later, he’s still interning and is hoping that will turn into a full-time job once he graduates.

While the idea of tax breaks as an incentive to stay in Ohio sounds nice, Warmbein said it wouldn’t have occurred to him to think about that when making decisions about where to hunt for a job.

He assumed -wrongly, he now says- that to work at a big company one day, he would have to leave Ohio. But the longer he stayed, his eyes were opened to the opportunities that exist here.

In a way, he said, Ohio just needs its own paign for students like him to understand the opportunities that already exist.

When he tells people back home that he works at Sherwin Williams, he said, they often assume he means in retail at a store.

‘Maybe I could go to a beach, somewhere warm.’

Zaria Johnson has spent her whole life in Ohio, growing up in the Cleveland area, going to school at Kent State University and completing a summer internship in Cleveland.

She’s ready for a change – but also might not be leaving the state as quickly as she once thought she would.