What’s more, Massachusetts has trouble attracting new residents. Less than 0.5 percent of people moved here from another state in the previous year; Oregon had eight times as many newcomers.

In 2012 — the last year for which data are available — workers in Massachusetts changed occupations less frequently than their peers in 48 other states. And the one place that had even fewer job-changers was Hawaii, where economic opportunities are limited by the world’s largest ocean.

When it comes to moving between homes and changing jobs, Bay Staters are even more stuck than the rest of the country.

As statistics goes, this is unexpected — maybe even shocking.


Massachusetts has a thriving, knowledge-driven economy built around science, information technology, and other high-skill fields. You would expect this to attract bright people to the state and unleash a fight for talent that regularly lures people into competing firms and neighboring industries.

What’s more, we have some of the finest colleges in the world. Surely, some of the people who study in our slice of America should fall in love with local culture and decide to stay.

Yet, despite all these advantages, Massachusetts remains among the least mobile states in the country.

And there’s one more reason to be surprised. Massachusetts has the best-educated workforce of any state in the country. You’d think that would translate into greater labor market fluidity. After all, a well-educated worker should be a flexible worker, someone with the intellectual skills to adapt to economic change and succeed in a variety of fields.

But this doesn’t seem to be true; our enviable college-graduation rate doesn’t obviously translate into greater career flexibility.

This poses a challenge to one of the fundamental premises of American education, namely that college is the key to economic success in the 21st century, because only a well-educated worker can keep up with the rapidly changing needs of businesses.

The fact that Massachusetts has the most college-educated workers — and the second-lowest level of job-switching — suggests that this “keeping up with a changing economy” idea may not be quite right.

To reinforce the point, look at what’s happened to the entire US labor force over the past few decades. Since 1980, the share of American workers with a bachelor’s degree has roughly doubled. And yet, at the same time, the number of people changing occupations has dropped by half.


Somehow, the remarkable increase in the number of workers with a bachelor’s degree hasn’t translated into greater labor market flexibility — not here in Massachusetts and not across the country as a whole. Counterintuitive though it may sound, Bay State workers were much more likely to move between jobs and careers back in the 1970s, when we were a rust-colored manufacturing economy.

This isn’t a knock on college. Education really does help people earn more money, to say nothing of its ability to feed curiosity and expand people’s minds. And Massachusetts’ highly educated workers have made the state one of the richest, most productive in the country.

But more flexible? It doesn’t seem so.