Compass Points: "Very Limited Opportunities" Mean High School Seniors Are Leaving Vermont

Every story that serves Vermonters has value, no matter who reports it — here’s one from across the state press that did.

Stay or Go? A Burlington High School senior surveys her graduating class on whether to stay in Vermont or leave — and finds most are leaving.
Siena DeMink · BHS Register

Compass Points is where we point you toward Vermont journalism worth your time — reporting from across the state press that informs, holds power to account, or simply tells Vermonters something true about the place they live. We didn’t write these. We just think they’re worth your time.

In “Stay or Go?”, graduating senior Siena DeMink does what good reporters do: she starts with a number and lets it breathe.

Of 106 BHS seniors who answered the Register’s survey, 73 said they’re leaving Vermont for college. Around that figure she gathers her classmates’ own reasoning — one headed to Providence College who sees “very limited opportunities” here, another who didn’t apply to UVM because her major lives out of state, and DeMink herself, who weighed it and chose to stay.

It’s a small, honest portrait of a question Vermont keeps asking from the top down — the state retains a smaller share of its college-bound students than any other, about 45 percent, per a study reported by Vermont Business Magazine — answered here from the bottom up, by the students actually making the call.

→ Read “Stay or Go?” at the BHS Register

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