Is Boise really one of the worst cities for young college grads? One study says so | Opinion

Boise recently made another Top 100 list, but this time we landed at the bottom of the pile.

Boise ranked 96th out of 100 cities in the U.S. for recent college graduates, according to Zumper, an apartment listing website. The ranking was shared by The New York Times’ Instagram account, where it caught my attention, especially since Boise doesn’t often land on the bottom of lists for places to live.

“Receiving F’s for both population of young people and restaurants per capita, Boise doesn’t exactly scream party town,” according to Zumper. “While Boise does have a particularly low unemployment rate, its consistent D’s in all other categories didn’t bode well for the cumulative average.”

Minneapolis; Denver; Seattle; Columbus, Ohio; and San Francisco made the top 5, while Boise, Newark, New Jersey; Providence, Rhode Island; Augusta, Georgia; and Laredo, Texas, scraped the bottom of the barrel of the 100 cities Zumper ranked.

I am no longer in the “young college grad” demographic, but this low ranking just didn’t seem right to me.

So I reached out to several young college grads living in Boise to see what they thought.

“Boise’s such a good place for young people,” said Camille Cressy, 29, who recently moved back to Boise after spending a couple of years in the Seattle area. “It’s great for forming friendships and making connections. Overall, my experience in Boise has been great for connecting with other young people.”

Cressy, a business banking relationship manager for KeyBank, and other 20-somethings were at a Boise Young Professionals get-together at Boise Brew Putt recently.

Morgan Boyd, 25, a Nampa native and commercial banking associate at Hillcrest Bank, graduated from Boise State University three years ago and is happy he stayed in Boise.

“I love living in Boise,” he said. “There’s so much to do, golf, bike, hike. It’s a great mix of experiences. I hope I don’t leave any time soon.”

So what’s going on with this Zumper study ?

The study looked at these factors when making its rankings:

• Median rent (Boise got a C)
• Concentration of young people (F)
• Population of people with a bachelor’s degree (D)
• Percentage of singles (D)
• Unemployment rate (A)
• Median income (D)
• Restaurants per capita (F)

Several of the rankings didn’t seem accurate, but Zumper didn’t include the raw data in its ranking.

I emailed Zumper and asked for the raw data used in the study and asked whether the data was just for the city of Boise or if it was for the entire Treasure Valley, which would make a big difference, particularly in terms of concentration of young people, singles and people with bachelor’s degrees.

I didn’t hear back.

Rents

As for rents, it does seem like Boise has earned a C.

The median price of a one-bedroom unit in Boise was $1,380 last month, while two-bedroom units cost $1,450, according to Zumper. That’s below the national averages of $1,531 for one-bedroom apartments and $1,911 for two-bedrooms.

By comparison, Minneapolis, which scored a B in Zumper’s ratings, has a median rent of $1,340 for a one-bedroom and $1,840 for a two-bedroom, according to the most recent Zumper national rent report , which has updated numbers from the Zumper college grads study. Columbus, Ohio, which scored an A, has a median rent of $1,280 for a one-bedroom and $1,430 for a two-bedroom.

“It’d be nice if rent was cheaper,” Boyd said.

Boise certainly saw a surge in rents during the pandemic.

Becca Proctor, 25, came to Boise from California’s Bay Area to attend Boise State, where she graduated in 2021, and stayed here.

She lived through the skyrocketing rents that Boise experienced during the pandemic.

Her rent for her one-bedroom apartment near the Boise State campus went from $930 per month, including utilities, to $1,175 a month, plus utilities, in a matter of three years.

But, she said, it was “doable.”

“It was a little bit hard at times, but, I mean, I did it, right?” she said. ”You’ve got to do what you can to make it work.”

Dylan Buckland, 27, a recruiter for TalentSpark who is originally from Shelley, said he didn’t think he’d be able to afford rent in Boise if it wasn’t for sharing the cost with his fiancee.

But at least it’s not San Francisco, where the median rent is $3,305. San Francisco’s average annual income for 25-year-olds, according to Zumper, is $87,946. Zumper didn’t list Boise’s average annual income for 25-year-olds and younger, and I’m not sure where that number would have come from.

Downtown is where it’s at

As for the concentration of young people, Boise’s low score doesn’t mesh with the experiences of the people I talked to.

“There’s lots of other young people,” Boyd said. “You go downtown on a Friday, Saturday night, especially when school’s in, and it’s hopping.”

But perhaps downtown is the key word.

Jaime del Barrio, 27, used to live and work in Meridian and now lives in west Boise. He said he feels that the closer he gets to downtown, the better chance he has of running into younger, single people.

“I know people from my church family in Meridian,” he said, “but they’re in their 30s, and it feels like everyone has a minivan full of kids. I think people my age is a slimmer portion.”

For Buckland, downtown is a must for a young person.

“It’s not very fun out there outside downtown,” he said. “It’s Boise or bust.”

On the night I met with the Boise Young Professionals group at Boise Brew Putt, about two dozen young professionals were there.

“We’re in a unique experience right now with all the growth and opportunities happening in Boise,” said Cressy, who is also an outreach coordinator for Boise Young Professionals. “But you have to get plugged in to uncover those opportunities.”

Jake Acevedo, 24, originally from Twin Falls, just moved to Boise from Pocatello, where he graduated from Idaho State University.

He was at the Boise Young Professionals get-together, which he said has helped him meet other young people.

“I do find that there are a lot of other young people in Boise,” he said. “But I do feel like young people don’t know there are other young people out there.”

I tried to do some fact-checking on Zumper’s numbers, and some of it didn’t add up.

Zumper said it looked at the population of 18-34-year-olds from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey in 2019 and gave Boise an F.

I looked at more updated numbers from the American Community Survey 2022 and found 54,818 people ages 20-34 (the American Community Survey doesn’t break out 18-19 year olds). Out of 235,684 total population in Boise, that’s 23% of the total population. That’s pretty high.

“Personally, I don’t feel like it’s hard to meet young people,” Proctor said. “A big reason I stayed here is because a lot of my friends are here. Some of them stayed here from other states that I went to college with, and some of them already lived here.”

Plus, Proctor is involved with Boise Young Professionals, and she said the group hosts 25-40 young professionals at each of its monthly social events, “and each time I see at least three new faces.”

Similarly, Zumper’s ranking of the population of 25-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees didn’t make sense. Zumper’s numbers were from the American Community Survey in 2020 and gave Boise a D.

I don’t know how Zumper got the number of 25-year-olds with a bachelor’s degree because it’s not broken out by age in the American Community Survey. But overall, the percentage of people with a bachelor’s degree in Boise is 45.8%.

Denver, which scored an A in this category, has 54.2%. Minneapolis got a B with 53.5%. St. Louis, which scored a C in this category, has 38.6%, which is lower than Boise’s, so it doesn’t make sense why it has a higher grade. Aurora, Colorado, also scored a D but has 31.8% of residents with a bachelor’s or higher.

Boise’s restaurant scene continues to improve with new places opening, but we’re still not close to Seattle or San Francisco. But an F? I don’t think so. It certainly wasn’t a complaint from any of the young folks I talked to.

Job market

Even though Boise scored an A for unemployment, so did most other cities in Zumper’s ranking.

And even though it should be a seller’s market, I found a common thread of young people struggling to find work.

Proctor said it took her about five months to find a job in her field of marketing, working for a financial adviser in Nampa. In the meantime, she worked at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.

Today, she’s the program coordinator for the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce. Of course, in her role, she’s supposed to be pro-Boise, but her love of Boise is genuine, and she said she wouldn’t want to live in any other city.

Del Barrio, who is from Southern California and has a business degree from Pepperdine University, moved to Idaho in 2020. He said he’s struggled with ageism in the workplace, where he found a dearth of other young professionals his age.

“I always felt I had to fight to be heard (at work) being young,” del Barrio told me in an interview. “There was a decade between me and the next person at work. So when I started, I was 25 and the next person closest to my age was 35.”

He previously worked for the city of Meridian and he’s looking for work in the marketing field, preferably close to or in downtown Boise.

Acevedo, who is looking for a job in the finance field, said there are lots of job opportunities, but competition for every job is high.

Dueling lists

Zumper’s study conflicts dramatically with another ranking that just came out from Pheabs, an online lending site, which ranked Boise in the Top 15 cities in the country for young professionals .

Pheabs’ criteria included the population of the cities as a whole and then the percentage of people age 25-34. It also looked at the average salaries in each city along with the unemployment rate, cost of living and average rent.

The Zumper and Pheabs studies have some overlap, such as highly ranked cities Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Kansas City, Oklahoma City and Columbus.

But, along with Boise, Pheabs gave top marks to Austin, Texas; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Omaha, Nebraska; Des Moines, Iowa; Wichita, Kansas; Frisco, Texas; and Pittsburgh.

“Boise is a thriving community with a vibrant arts and culinary scene, including a James Beard Award-winning chef and several semifinalists,” Bobbi-Jo Meuleman, president and CEO of Boise Metro Chamber, said in a statement emailed to me for this column. “I do not feel that blog rankings are a strong indicator for success for our Boise State students and alumni. Boise State bachelor’s graduates are up 52% since 2011, that data point speaks for itself. Boise is a great place to live and work and has a great community culture.”

Overall, it’s a mixed bag for Boise, but I certainly don’t think Boise deserves a bottom 5 ranking.

I think every young person should live in a big city at least once at some point in their life. My wife and I lived in San Francisco for three years before settling down, buying a house and having kids in Rochester, New York (No. 78 on Zumper’s list). Boise isn’t on the same level as New York City or San Francisco, but if I were a young college grad, there are a lot worse places to land.