In a post meant to highlight the 31 Nebraska students who notched perfect scores on the ACT this year, Gov. Jim Pillen reignited a debate surrounding the flight of Nebraska’s top students with a tweet that also raised alarm for some First Amendment advocates in the state.
Tweeting from the governor’s official account, Pillen’s team posted a photo June 24 from a ceremony in the state Capitol’s Rotunda, where the governor congratulated the crop of perfect scorers on their academic achievement and implored them “to return and utilize your talents here” after college.
The post prompted criticism for its acknowledgment that most of the state’s “best and brightest” students are headed elsewhere for higher education — and for the governor’s office’s apparent unwillingness to hear criticism from residents in response to the tweet.
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These are among our best and brightest -- Nebraska students with big dreams. They aced the the ACT, receiving a top score of 36. Two students even did it twice. Congrats and be sure to bring your talents back to Nebraska after college! pic.twitter.com/yL6IQtNY6T
— Governor Jim Pillen (@TeamPillen) June 24, 2023
Pillen’s office turned off the replies on his official Twitter account when they posted a photo from the ceremony, disallowing direct responses to the governor’s account and limiting debate on the so-called brain drain that has plagued Nebraska for more than a decade.
The move, which does not amount to outright censorship in part because users were still able to weigh in via Twitter’s “quote tweet” function, traffics in somewhat of a legal gray area, said Rose Godinez, the legal director for ACLU of Nebraska.
A public official outright blocking a user on social media from their official government account would be a violation of the First Amendment, Godinez said. And though the limitations Pillen’s team placed on replies to last week’s tweet are more nuanced, Godinez said the act “is not good governance.”
“It doesn’t promote transparency or accessibility to the top public official in the state,” she said. “They should be allowing comments and they should be welcoming the chance to hear from Nebraskans in this digital public square, essentially.
“But instead they’re looking to quiet feedback on this issue and are directly stifling debate.”
Laura Strimple, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Pillen’s communications team had experienced a staffing change in the days before sending the tweet and the decision to limit replies — a multi-step process that the account has not repeated since the June 24 tweet — was inadvertent.
Strimple removed the limitations that had been placed on replies after inquires from the Journal Star on Friday.
The tweet, too, drew renewed attention to a conversation that has grown increasingly central to Nebraska politics in recent years and months: the departure of the state’s college-educated workforce and young people at large.
Out-migration trend higher among educated
More people have exited the state than have settled in Nebraska from other states each year since 2010.
That trend in migration has come with the disproportionate flight of residents with a bachelor’s degree or a higher level of education, more of whom have fled Nebraska since 2010 than have moved here by thousands each year, according to the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The continued exodus of Nebraska’s most educated workers briefly took center stage in the state’s Legislature in May when 115 state businesses signed a letter to Pillen and state lawmakers opposing “harmful social legislation” as senators weighed a bill that would ban gender-affirming surgeries for trans youth.
A week later, the Human Rights Campaign sent a similar letter to senators and Pillen listing businesses opposed to “anti-LGBTQ state legislation.” The letter included more than 300 signatures, including major corporations such as Apple, General Motors, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and United Airlines.
The Legislature on May 19 passed LB574, which Pillen signed and praised, banning gender-affirming surgeries for minors and further restricting access to abortion in the state.
The ACLU of Nebraska has since filed a lawsuit on behalf of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland seeking a permanent injunction from the bill being enforced.
“This particular post is just telling … because it acknowledges that young people are leaving the state, or at least that’s the insinuation being made in this statement,” said Godinez, again referring to Pillen’s June 24 tweet before criticizing the governor for his support of LB574.
“And in the first six months of his time as governor, Gov. Pillen signed and supported deeply harmful legislation that isn’t attracting people to our state. It’s driving young Nebraskans out of state.”
Students cite myriad reasons for leaving
For myriad reasons, the high-achieving students Pillen recognized in the Rotunda on June 20 are, largely, leaving Nebraska.
Of the 31 Nebraska students who notched perfect scores on the standardized college admissions exam this year, 20 have made their post-graduate plans public in newspaper stories and social media posts.
Fifteen of those 20 plan to attend college out of state, opting for universities that include Columbia, Stanford, Duke, Notre Dame and Northwestern, among others.
Only four of the 20 will attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Another plans to go to the university’s Omaha campus.
“Like all high academic achievers, some students will attend school in state and others will leave,” Strimple, Pillen’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. “In sharing his best wishes, the governor was simply encouraging those students who had announced plans to attend college outside Nebraska to return to their home state afterward.”
If all things were equal, Leo Turner would be staying put in Lincoln and heading to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln this fall.
The recent Lincoln Southeast High School graduate who twice scored a perfect 36 on the ACT applied to Nebraska’s flagship campus, one of three Division I schools in the state where he has grown up and where most of his high school friends are staying to pursue higher education.
But Turner is the kind of high achiever who officials can only hope returns to the state after college.
He would have preferred to attend UNL this fall but will instead double-major in math and physics at the University of Alabama, which the 18-year-old chose over Fordham and Nebraska’s flagship university.
The reasons were many, Turner said, but it boiled down to one: a state school more than 800 miles from Lincoln offered a true full-ride scholarship.
“I got a Regents Scholarship (offer from UNL). I’m not gonna try and pretend that it’s not great,” he said. “But when I have an option where my tuition’s being paid for, my housing’s being paid for, almost everything is being paid for. And then I compare it to UNL.
“As much as I might want to stay at UNL — even if I love it here — it just really does not make sense to do that.”
As a candidate for governor, Pillen acknowledged leaders “need to stop the out-migration of the brain drain” and said he would aim to leverage private dollars to offset the costs of post-high school education for Nebraskans.
When University of Nebraska officials announced in May they needed to close a $49.4 million budget shortfall in the 2023-24 fiscal year, they pointed to dwindling enrollment and “muted” growth in state appropriations that has not kept up with inflation in recent years.
Turner, who said he hopes to return to Nebraska for a year or two after he earns a Ph.D. in physics to further explore what the state’s two largest cities have to offer, said he ultimately plans to settle in a major, walkable city like Chicago, Boston or Washington, D.C.
It’s a similar story for Cameron Coen, who will study astronautical engineering — a specific program not offered anywhere in Nebraska — at the University of Southern California this fall following his graduation from Lincoln Southwest in May. He applied to UNL but didn’t seriously consider enrolling, he said.
Coen, who hopes to work for NASA or another spacecraft-centered agency or company after college and graduate school, doesn’t see a future for himself in his home state, he said, where there aren’t enough opportunities in STEM fields.
And though he decided to leave the state long before the Legislature passed LB574, Coen said its passage “was definitely something that did not increase my desire to stay.”
“I’ll be glad to return to Nebraska, hopefully, over the summer and over the breaks and see all the great people I’ve met here,” he said. “People from Nebraska are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, I would say, so that is something I’m really looking forward to.
“But I’m also just excited to get out of the state (and) kind of see what’s out there.”
Joe Rutar, who scored a perfect 36 on the ACT as a senior at Elkhorn South High School in 2022, found herself in a similar circumstances last year, when she opted to enroll at St. Olaf College in Minnesota without ever considering going to college in Nebraska.
“I just wasn’t super inspired by continuing to live in Nebraska full time after graduation,” said Rutar, who just wrapped up her freshman year at the liberal arts school south of Minneapolis.
When she graduated from Elkhorn South, Rutar planned to study political science to kick off a career in law, hoping to work as a public defender or for an organization like the ACLU.
She now plans to study English and French — students at St. Olaf don’t declare a major until the end of their sophomore year — with aspirations to work in publishing upon graduation.
Rutar has had to reckon with her switch while watching from afar as a conservative agenda swept its way through the Legislature, bringing the kind of “wave of intolerance” she hoped to fight as an attorney in Nebraska, she said.
“I just wasn’t strong enough to be a political science major,” she said.
Still three years from college graduation, Rutar doesn’t yet know what will come next. She likes the Twin Cities and has enjoyed her time in Minnesota, which she said should serve as a beacon for what Midwestern states could become.
And while a return to Omaha after graduation remains on the table, Rutar said, it’s an option that seems to grow more remote each time lawmakers pass bills that make life less livable in her home state.
“There’s no reason to stay,” she said.