The three state universities in Iowa work to educate students on an undergraduate level, with the goal to prepare graduate students to ultimately add to the workforce when they leave any of the three campuses.

But it turns out that the workforce that they are adding to isn’t even in Iowa. It’s called “brain drain,” and Iowa is feeling its effects.

After students graduate with a four-year undergraduate degree or a graduate degree they don’t seem to be staying in the state that educated them. Instead, graduates are looking to larger cities to provide their first professional jobs. This migration of sorts is leaving the Iowa workforce lacking in up-and-coming professionals.

During its last meeting at the University of Iowa, the Board of Regents addressed this issue with an enticing incentive to stay in Iowa — money.

It was proposed by a collection of students from each of the three universities that graduate and professional students receive a 50 percent tax break if they decide to stay in Iowa to work. And more than that, if a student decided Iowa was the place for them, they would receive a 75 percent tax break if they lived in a nonmetropolitan area. This means that students would need to be employed outside of major cities like Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Des Moines.

Although we see the difficulty in that, the benefits to Iowa and the students themselves outweigh the potential negatives, and this is a proposal that should be put through.

The obvious initial argument is that finding a job in a smaller area does not come as easy as it potentially could in a larger city. Additionally, not all majors are conducive to life in a small- to medium-sized town.

But one thing that all students have in common, regardless of the major they leave their respective university with, is making money in the real world and dealing with the situations that come with being an adult right out of college, including taxes.

If anything can be done to help newly graduated college students get on their feet — to start figuring out how to make a dent in their mountain of college — it’s a positive thing.

Offering graduates a tax break is a huge incentive and will more than likely be an effective and feasible way to keep young professionals in big-city and small-town Iowa. These universities used their resources to educate young people to become young professionals; all effort should be made to retain them in the state that helped them become young professionals with newly minted degrees.