It's not as if Sarah Noffze dislikes Michigan.

After all, she grew up in suburban Detroit, went to Michigan State University and served on the homecoming court. She remains loyal to her beloved Sparty.

But as she neared graduation in 2014, the marketing major set her sights on a job elsewhere.

“My original goal was to move someplace warmer. I was thinking maybe California,” recalled Noffze, 22.

But in early 2015, Noffze landed a job at Hormel Foods in Minneapolis, where she is now a regional retail sales manager. She gets the irony.

“Hormel ended up offering me a full-time job,” she said. “I couldn't turn down the offer.”

And now? She doesn't mind the cold — while growing to appreciate the array of diversions that Minneapolis offers.

“There's always lots of things to do ‒ beer fests, a Shania Twain concert, Christmas parades. There's lots of young people living here, which is very attractive to me. There's actually lots of people from Michigan and Michigan State here.”

As Noffze said, she has plenty of company.

According to the U.S. Census, Michigan had a net domestic migration loss of 38,911 people in the one-year period from July 2014 to July 2015. Translation: That's how many more people left for other states than moved in. That’s the sixth highest population loss in the nation.

And just as notably, Michigan continues to lose a particularly valuable human resource: young people with college degrees.

While that’s less of a percentage loss than previous years, it extends a troubling pattern of young, educated people leaving the state in greater numbers than those coming to Michigan.Census figures show that Michigan had an estimated net migration loss of 0.7 percent of those age 22-34 with a bachelor's degree or higher.

“We are still seeing young people, especially people from elite universities, going elsewhere,” said demographic expert Kurt Metzger, director emeritus of Data Driven Detroit, a research organization.

“They have so many more options. We are just not capturing those people,” said Metzger, now mayor of Pleasant Ridge.