(Radio Iowa) – Iowa’s population grew by nearly eight-thousand residents last year, but a new report from an Iowa based research group says the slow pace of that growth is a drag on the state’s economic outlook. Ben Murrey is Iowa director of Policy and Research for the Common Sense Institute.
“We have a continuation of some of the demographic struggles that Iowa has been dealing with for decades,” Murrey said. “…More people are leaving Iowa than coming in. We have falling birth rates and rising rates of death, which makes sense with our aging population.” Iowa’s birth rate last year was 71 percent below the average birth rate between 1991 and 2019. And nearly a thousand more people moved out of Iowa in 2025 than moved in last year.
While that’s better than the long term trend, Murrey says Iowa ranked 39th nationally in outward migration to other states. “We don’t have the best weather here. let’s be honest. We don’t have mountains. We don’t have coastlines,” Murrey said. “…When you look at the Midwestern states, Iowa’s not doing particularly well, so we looked at 12 Midwestern states, including Iowa, and Iowa ranked 11th out of 12.”
Murrey’s research group has recently examined factors that might be influencing this trend and found Iowa struggles to keep graduates of the three public universities.”You see Iowa producing highly-educated graduates, not having enough jobs for all of them and so some of them have to leave Iowa to find work in their field,” Murrey said, “…but then you hear employers say: ‘well, we can’t find the workforce we need.’ Oftentimes what that employer needs is somebody who maybe isn’t highly educated.”
According to U.S. Census data, over 93 percent of Iowa residents over the age of 25 are high school graduates and just over 30 percent of them have a college degree.
