By: Charlie Adelman

In an effort to compete with its northeast neighbors, Maine lawmakers are proposing the state give college graduates tax credits for living and working in the state after they get out of school.

If Maine voters pass the proposal in November, any graduates of Maine’s public or private universities, including community colleges, could claim a tax credit equal to the amount of student loans they still have left to pay. The initiative began as a petition sponsored by the group Opportunity Maine, and it collected 72,000 signatures before it went to the state legislature.

Rob Brown, program director with Opportunity Maine, said he hopes Maine will become the first state to adopt the plan, especially because it has 30 percent fewer people with college degrees than the rest of New England state populations. Only 10 percent of students stay in Maine immediately after graduation, said Bowdoin College Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster.

“You can always make more money in Boston or New York,” Brown said. “Maine can’t offer the types of wages to efficiently pay off [student loan] debt.

“We are hoping to lessen the impact of student debt to help students stay in-state, if they wish,” he added.

To offer incentive to state business, the proposal would also provide tax credits to businesses hiring recent college graduates living in the state.

Massachusetts would not necessarily benefit from a similar tax credit, said Isabel Hardy, a spokeswoman for Onein3, a Boston program that aims to help the city’s many college students and recent graduates purchase homes and find networking opportunities.

“It would be hard to say whether Boston would even have enough jobs for every college grad if something like this were offered and more students stayed in the city,” she said.

Hardy recommended Massachusetts focus on lowering housing costs for college graduates. Two state senators recently proposed a bill that would offer recent Massachusetts college graduates $10,000 toward the cost of housing to stay in the commonwealth.

State Sen. Edward Augustus (D-Worcester), who vice chairs the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Education, said lawmakers are considering other ways to keep students in the commonwealth.

“[Massachusetts has] huge numbers of students from all over the world,” he said, “but not as many as we’d like stay after college.”

Augustus said Massachusetts lawmakers are instead working to foster growth of specific industries — especially the biotechnology, bioengineering and software industries — in hopes of providing more jobs to graduates in those fields.

“Boston is a very cool city to live in, and we’d like to look for new strategies such as these to get people to stay,” he said.

© Copyright 2007 The Daily Free Press