Almost 4 in 10 young people who moved to a new state in 2024 were college kids getting dropped off at a dorm by their parents. Once you know that, you can almost guess which states are losing the most young people. New Jersey lost a net 37,556 Gen Z adults and Illinois lost 20,031. For decades, those two have sent more kids away to college than any other states in the country. New Jersey ships out so many that people in higher ed call it the "cuckoo bird state," after the bird that lays its eggs in other birds' nests. Follow the Illinois kids and you end up in Missouri, which had the second biggest gain of any state at +14K. Illinois sends Mizzou more students than any other state outside Missouri. In fall 2024 alone, 1,215 freshmen from Illinois showed up on campus, and over 4,100 Illinois kids were enrolled there. South Carolina is doing the same thing, just bigger. Only about half of the University of South Carolina's 7,290 freshmen in fall 2024 were actually from South Carolina. Coastal Carolina has more out-of-state students than in-state ones. New York and New Jersey sent 2,300 freshmen to the state's public colleges in one year, and three out of four applicants to its four biggest schools live somewhere else. USC's president says the parents "vote with their SUVs," talking about all the out-of-state plates on move-in day. Then there's Charlotte, which sits right on the border. The number one place North Carolina's Gen Z moved to was South Carolina, about 9,400 people. A lot of them went 30 minutes down I-77 to towns like Fort Mill, which grew 57.7% in five years and is basically a Charlotte suburb. Plenty of them still drive into Charlotte for work every morning, and on paper they moved to another state. Colleges are about to fight even harder for these kids. The number of American 18-year-olds started shrinking with the class of 2025, and USC's president already told state lawmakers they need to recruit out of state even more aggressively. Honestly, the most effective economic development office in South Carolina might be the admissions office at USC.