With an average monthly income of $2,632 and 15.6% of its rental listings considered affordable for college grads, Baton Rouge has snagged the No. 13 spot on MONEY’s ranking of 50 best cities for new college graduates.
The ranking is based on data compiled by real estate site Trulia and careers site Indeed. The pair looked at which cities provide the best combination of affordable rental properties and the types of jobs that typically employ new grads.
Their conclusion: Finding the ideal place to work and live is tricky, because the market in which graduates might find the best-paying jobs may also happen to be too pricey for a 22-year-old to afford rent.
Take for instance the San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, California, metro area in Silicon Valley, which had the highest percentage of jobs amenable to those right out of college. Nearly a third of all postings in San Jose were friendly to new graduates. Recent grads could expect to earn around $3,333 a month there.
Trouble is, all of that economic activity has dramatically driven up demand and prices for homes and apartments. In the San Jose market, new grads can only afford 2.5% of the available rental listings in the area.
MONEY took the data from the survey and eliminated locations where less than than 10% of the housing market was accessible to new grads. The magazine also looked at the top job markets among the remaining towns on the list.
In Baton Rouge, 14.5% of job listings are considered “grad friendly.”
Topping MONEY’s ranking is the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land metro area in Texas, where grads can expect to earn $3,188 per month and where at least 18.4% of housing lists are grad friendly. About 16.7% of jobs are right for new college grads.
Rounding out the top five are: Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, Connecticut; Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, Maryland; and Kansas City in Missouri and Kansas.
