From what Jack Selig saw of Maine on a family vacation to Bar Harbor as a teenager, it was both similar to his home state of Arkansas in ways he liked — the natural beauty and access to the outdoors — and different enough that going to college here would offer something new.

As a student at Bowdoin, Maine only grew on him, and by his junior year, he was already thinking it would be fun to move to Portland after graduation. Three of his roommates — themselves from New Hampshire, Vermont and Colorado — agreed, and for the past year, they, along with a friend who went to Bates, have been living in a house on Bradley Street.

They like to ride their bikes around town and have taken them on the ferry to Peaks Island. They have Portland rent to pay, so their dining budgets are limited, but they go to the nearby coffee shops, like Coveside and Rwanda Bean, and especially love the falafel at Dina’s Cuisine “because they’re cheap and delicious,” Selig said. They made a camping reservation at Baxter State Park this summer and plan to hike Katahdin.

“It’s a great combination of having a cool city and being able to get outside,” Selig said.

No matter what longtime residents might say about Portland being better before all the hotels and high-end shops, there’s no question that, on a national level, the city’s reputation as a desirable place to live has only grown since I moved here after graduating from Bowdoin in 2006.

Then, I was one of just a few members of my class from a different state who stayed in Maine, though I’ve since seen many more return, likely a result of Portland’s rising appeal and pandemic- and age-related priority shifts. But I had to wonder, as Portland’s gotten cooler to the outside world, if more Maine college students have been skipping the step of going to a bigger city and moving instead to the one right here.

Census data shows that, since the pandemic, Portland has drawn more recent college graduates to the city and more college-educated workers of all ages away from larger metro areas. And some surveys of Maine college seniors indicate that more have been choosing to stay in Maine after graduation.

DRAWING DIPLOMAS

Though it’s unclear where they came from, the portion of 18- to 24-year-old Portland residents with bachelor’s degrees grew 40% between 2018 and 2023 — double the national increase and triple that of Maine as a whole — according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Surveys.

It also had the second-highest percentage of residents in their 20s (19.4%, after Tallahassee, Florida) among the 98 cities that apartment rental website ApartmentAdvisor assessed for its 2025 list of Best Cities for College Grads.

Portland was ranked No. 3 overall, after Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C., and came out on top for rental quality, tenant protections and density of entertainment.

Places like Portland, with an increasing number of new apartments, restaurants and breweries, also have drawn more college-educated workers away from larger, more expensive cities in the past decade and in even greater numbers since the pandemic, with the rise of remote work opportunities, according to a 2023 New York Times analysis of census data.

That includes Kari Twaite, a member of my class who was living in Washington, D.C., until a couple of years ago, when she got a job at Bowdoin and realized her dream of moving her family to Maine. Now, as senior associate director of Bowdoin Career Exploration and Development, she helps students decide what to do after college.

Although Twaite hasn’t been there long enough to witness a trend firsthand, there are some indications that more Maine college graduates are staying in state. In a senior survey of the Bowdoin College class of 2024, 16% of respondents said they planned to stay in Maine after graduation. The last time the college asked the same question, in 2018, that number was 10%.

At the University of Maine, the portion of in-state students per class who have stayed in Maine has hovered around 75% on average, both in the years leading up to the pandemic and the years since, but the same figure for out-of-state students grew from 17.5% to 28.5% after 2020. A certain group of students from Maine, however, is showing more interest in staying in state: 63% of Mitchell Scholars graduating in 2024 said they planned to live in Maine after college — the most since 2019, when the Mitchell Institute started asking the Maine high school graduates who receive its scholarships.

FINDING JOBS AND COMMUNITY

Twaite doesn’t see remote work as the driving factor behind any increased interest in living in Maine among students at the Brunswick college. Most who come into her office, she said, would prefer in-person jobs. (Case in point, only one of Selig’s housemates has been working remotely.) She believes it’s a desire for community, that’s grown in the face of the tumult of recent years, leading more students to want to stay in a place they now have some roots and connections, including to the active alumni network. That could be a much-needed boon to Maine’s workforce, which is struggling to replace the amount of people who are retiring.

Zach Liljeholm, who graduated this month from Maine College of Art & Design, said the professional connections he made as an art student, including with Portland residents who moved here from Boston and New York, was a big reason he wanted to stick around.

Originally from the South Shore of Massachusetts, Liljeholm moved to his grandparents’ house in Wells before college, thinking he’d commute from there, but ended up living on the Portland campus. He loves the proximity to the ocean and the look of the brick sidewalks, even though he hates walking on them.

Liljeholm, a graphic design major who interned at Portland advertising agency Via last summer, got a job there as an associate art director and moved this week into an apartment in the West End. He’s excited to keep exploring the city and take more walks on the Eastern Prom. Still, he’s been surprised to find out how many of his classmates are staying, too.

According to MECA&D, between 44% and 50% of alumni stay in the Portland area, though the college didn’t know whether those numbers have changed over time. While the University of New England didn’t have geographic data for its general student population, it did say that more than 25% of its health professional graduates in the last 10 years are licensed to practice in the state but, again, couldn’t speak to any trends. Same for Colby College in Waterville, where nearly 10% of graduates between 2014 and 2024 stayed in Maine, including 11 of last year’s seniors who got jobs in Portland.

Matthew Erwin, who’s graduating this month from Colby, always imagined he’d stay in the Northeast after college but in a bigger city, like New York, Philadelphia or Boston, where he grew up.

But after living in Waterville for the last four years, that’s become less important to him. With a Portland-based job at TD Bank, where he interned last summer, he plans to work mostly remotely from his hometown at first but eventually move here.

“A lot of my friends are looking at Portland jobs now, more than they probably would have four years ago,” he said.

The Center for Purposeful Work at Bates College in Lewiston, which keeps track of where students get jobs after graduation, hasn’t seen a recent increase in graduates working in Maine after college, with that figure fluctuating between 8% and 13% from 2018 to 2024, but Bowdoin grad Selig and his housemates say there’s a prominent Bates contingent in Portland.

STAYING POWER

Although some of the Bradley Street residents plan to leave after the summer, Selig — who recently completed a teaching certification program through Bowdoin that included a semester in a Casco Bay High School classroom — is now applying to teaching jobs in the area.

“I’m hoping to stay another year at least,” Selig said, “and potentially longer, who knows?”

Of five Bowdoin graduates I wrote about 10 years ago, as they were moving out of their off-campus house in Brunswick — most right to Portland — two are still around.

Oriana Farnham, who initially had gotten a job as a paralegal at Pine Tree Legal Assistance, ended up going to law school at Northeastern University. She thought about looking for jobs in Boston after, but she missed Maine. Farnham now works as a civil legal aid attorney at Maine Equal Justice and bought a house in Westbrook, where she’s an alternate member of the planning board.

Moving to Portland “wasn’t the ‘cool’ thing to do” when they were in college, Farnham said in an email, with most people moving to Boston, New York and D.C., but that seemed to be changing by the time they were seniors.

“In our early years in Portland, we probably knew a dozen other people from our class who were around, and it seemed like every graduating class after that had more and more people moving to Portland,” she said. “Now I can hardly go anywhere in Portland without seeing someone I know from Bowdoin.”