College seniors often hope to walk off the graduation stage and into their first big-kid job in New York City, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles.

But drill deeper into just one of those cities, and you'll find a sobering truth: In a low-hire, low-fire labor market with little movement and a higher-than-usual unemployment rate for recent college grads, entry-level opportunities in New York City are declining, and the city's unemployment rate, at 5.4% in May, is far above the national level. And that's in a market where average rents clock in around $3,700.

The picture looks more promising farther south, where labor markets are tighter, affordability is better, and population growth is booming.

"If you are not considering the South, you are not giving yourself your best chance for landing something that is going to help you get on the career ladder and start to build your profile," said Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn head of economics for the Americas. "You have to take the South seriously as a place to work if you haven't taken it seriously to date." 

There's a growing pile of economic research and rankings to back that sentiment. While San Francisco leads the pack in LinkedIn's ranking for entry-level opportunities by city, Orlando, Atlanta, Charleston, Tampa, Austin, and Nashville all make the cut of top 10 markets. ADP's list of top metropolitan areas for college grads — which takes hiring rates, wages, and affordability into account — also leans southern, putting Birmingham and Tampa above San Jose. New York City, which ranks at the bottom in ADP's top 10, ranks below Charlotte. 

The states that have seen the largest percentage gain in year-over-year job growth by the federal government's tally as of May are also clustered below the Mason-Dixon Line. Though Nevada saw the biggest increase, North Carolina, West Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas were among the biggest winners, while North Carolina alone added more positions than New York, despite the entire state having a little more than half of the city's population.

Visa Business and Economic Insights, meanwhile, found the South accounted for 58% of all jobs added between 2019 and 2025 as the region's population continued to grow. Incomes there were also rising as the labor market "shifted toward higher-skilled and higher-paying sectors," Visa noted in a 2025 analysis.

With hiring in recent years concentrated in healthcare, hospitality, and local government services, the job market in the South is positioned to benefit from snowbirds and the services that support them, Kantenga said. Retirees who love the South are creating their own economic momentum, while the region is also drawing manufacturing and tech jobs.

"We still see hiring more than 20% below pre-pandemic levels," Kantenga said. "There's not a lot of momentum in the market. Most of the jobs being added are being added in healthcare. There's certainly a disproportionate amount of them that are being added in the South as well."

Still, stronger job markets and attractive programs don't necessarily mean grads will flock to the South. Class of 2025 data from Handshake shows graduating seniors that year sent the most job applications to New York City and Chicago. 

The "trend toward the South" has been going on for at least a decade, Kantenga said, though the pandemic accelerated it. Even as population growth slowed in most of the nation's counties between July 2024 and July 2025 as immigration declined, for example, many of the fastest-growing counties were in southeastern states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, Census Bureau data shows.

"We are seeing that over the next 30 years, it is likely that the Southeast is going to see more population growth than any other region of the country," Joseph Von Nessen, a research economist at the University of South Carolina, told Yahoo Finance. 

Just last year, data from Visa Business and Economic Insights showed the South accounted for 41% of job growth, despite accounting for 38% of total employment. 

"Population growth means that more employers are going to be attracted to the region because it's a larger population base that they can serve, and a greater population also means that employers are wanting to locate in an area where there is a larger workforce that they can draw from," Von Nessen said.  

Companies are also moving their headquarters, with the Dallas-Fort Worth area gaining 11 new HQs in 2025 "from other higher-cost metro areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, New York and Chicago," according to a report from CBRE. The metropolitan regions of Miami, Austin, and Charlotte also added HQ relocations.

Michael Toma, an economics professor at Georgia Southern University, noted that the Savannah region attracted a massive EV and hybrid vehicle plant from Hyundai, which, when it opened last year, was expected to bring 8,500 jobs to the site by 2031. Yamaha Motor's US operations, meanwhile, announced this year that its headquarters will relocate from California to Kennesaw, Ga., part of the greater Atlanta area.

"Southern economies have diversified, they've become much more high-tech in the last 20 to 30 years, there's a wide variety of opportunities for folks in sciences as well as other high-paying job markets," Toma said. 

Jerry Parrish, chief economist at the Metro Atlanta Chamber, pointed to his city's position at the top of WalletHub's rankings for the best place to start a career this year.

"We've actually grown by more than 10,000 jobs in just the last four months," he said, despite some softness last year. 

Like the rest of the country, hiring has ticked up in the healthcare sector, but "we've signed a lot of companies to expand their businesses here or move a headquarters here, and now those kinds of things are paying off," Parrish added. (Morgan Stanley, which is looking to build out a new regional headquarters, is weighing Dallas or Alpharetta, in the Atlanta metro area, as two options, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

One state over, Trevor Sutton, chief economic development officer for the Birmingham Business Alliance, said Birmingham has changed dramatically since he was a kid growing up in what was once Alabama's largest city. (The top spot has since been taken by Huntsville, which has seen tremendous growth, thanks in part to its growing aerospace and defense sectors.) 

Birmingham's metro area topped ADP's ranking for the best markets for new grads this year, with the private payroll processor citing "a strong 2.8 percent hiring rate" as well as median annual wages for recent graduates that soared more than 16% to about $59,000.

It helps that downtown Birmingham now feels more like a "hub and a magnet for the region," Sutton said, rather than a nine-to-five hot spot. Birmingham is also a host city in the statewide Fuel Alabama program, which connects college students with opportunities and community during their summer internships.

"What it does is it helps (students) grow their network outside of their friend group that they had where they were going to college, but it also exposes them to the different companies and opportunities here in Birmingham," Sutton said. "Let's say even if they didn't like where they were doing a summer internship, they met two or three people from two or three different companies that they would have never thought about."

That can help keep them in Birmingham in the long run.

"My goal to my team is: We will make Birmingham the No. 1 summer internship destination in the Southeast," Sutton said. "If we can get them here, our employers that we work very closely with are going to give them a great experience; we will make sure they'll have a great experience after 5 p.m.; and they'll have a strong network." 

Emma Ockerman is a reporter covering the economy and labor for Yahoo Finance. You can reach her at emma.ockerman@yahooinc.com.

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