Yesterday the Press and Journal front page included a piece about youngsters leaving the Highlands to get education or jobs. It reported HIE funded research into attitudes of 15 to 30 year olds, and findings that 25% believed they needed to move south for opportunities.
Quite why HIE needed to spend £66,000 finding out something anybody in Sutherland could have told them for free is cause for comment. We’ve lived in Dornoch for 10 years and watched bright, hardworking kids leave for the south every year. They’ll come back of course – when they retire.
Researching the reasons is pointless. It’s obvious 18 year olds won’t want to stay in Bettyhill, Thurso, Wick, Brora, Golspie, Dornoch, Tain etc. They want some bright lights and noise.
Researching ways to keep them in the area shouldn’t be necessary either. Kids will go where other kids are, where they can get a great education and later, good jobs.
The best way to keep youngsters in the area is to bring other youngsters here, making Inverness the regional capital it wants to be.
And that takes a university and new, vibrant businesses, innovating, growing and creating opportunity.
It’s been proved countless times – great universities attract great students, great companies and great investors. We don’t have to look any further than Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge to see the wealth generated by learning, research and innovation.
Building UHI into a proper university, instead of a vehicle for distributed social engineering, would be a great start. Creating a proper business development agency focused on helping innovators manage risk, rather than politically correct government largesse will do the rest.
Finland has already proved small, cold, dark countries can be world leaders this way – with Nokia.
Related articles by Zemanta
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=c40e8be3-102a-4cb8-a8d5-6d0170825c64)
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
