By Addie Jones

Mia Quain has done the math. Her salary is $60,000, the most she has ever earned, for a systems administrator position at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

By most metrics, Quain is doing things right. She has a steady job, is mid-career and holds technical skills. Yet she still cannot afford to buy a house in the area she has called home for more than three decades.

“The cheapest possible housing is like $250,000 when you look at the real estate listings,” said Quain, 33, who grew up in Gravette. “And the wages have just not gone up like that.”

Many young professionals in Northwest Arkansas are earning more and working harder while feeling they are falling further behind previous generations. The culprit is a pair of crises – a housing market outpacing wages and a job market with ever-moving goalposts.

In 2019, Quain and her then-partner purchased a home in Decatur for $76,000. The mortgage, bills and insurance combined to around $650. Today, that same house is estimated between $175,000 and $200,000, and a similar starter home would cost around $2,000 a month. 

Nothing has changed about the house, but everything has about the economy.

“Houses are like two to three times more expensive than they used to be,” Quain said, “and careers are the same almost. Maybe they’ve gone up by 25% or 30% in the same time period.”

According to data from the Sam M. Walton College of Business Career Services office, the average starting salary for a Walton College graduate was $51,622 in 2021, the earliest year on record. By 2024, the number had risen to $60,464, an approximate 17% increase over three years.

The overall job market has also grown more uncertain, with Career Services Senior Director Lindsey Steiger-Muck sharing companies are waiting longer to determine how many full-time roles they have available and not posting positions as early as the past.

The U of A Class of 2024 Career Outcomes Report shows Walton graduates concentrated heavily in retail, consumer packaged goods, transportation and logistics, industries heavily tied to the Walmart ecosystem in NWA. For graduates whose degrees fall outside those areas, the region offers a considerably thinner market.

Hadassah Toliver graduated from the U of A in December 2025 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She had the education, ambition and plan to become a child psychologist, but her job search proved to be more difficult than expected.

“I felt like since I had the qualifications, it should be easier,” she said. “But it was just pretty hard overall to find one.”

It took Toliver two months to secure a position as a registered behavior technician after applying to 30 jobs across multiple platforms: Indeed, Handshake, LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter. The experience taught her the realities of the current job market, where people often report applications being ignored, interviews constantly ending in rejection and the sad realization that a degree is not the differentiator it once was.

Toliver said several of coworkers do not hold degrees yet earn the same or more than she does.

“I went through four years of college just to get the same level of things as people that didn’t go,” she said. “Nothing against people that didn’t go. But it’s just frustrating that I spent all that money, all the years, and it’s still the same value.”

Toliver is in a field where a bachelor’s degree opens relatively few doors. Specialized roles in areas like clinical work and research require graduate training. 

“Psychology is a really hard degree to get entry-level jobs in,” Toliver said. “So that was basically the only thing I could do that relates to what I want to do in the future.”

The 2024 Outcomes Report shows psychology undergraduates reported a mean starting salary of $37,086, nearly $23,000 below the university-wide bachelor’s median of $60,000.

While Toliver lives in Fayetteville, she commutes to Bentonville for work – an increasingly common practice for young professionals who feel priced out and left out of the student-focused market. Bentonville, home to Walmart’s global headquarters, unofficially serves as the region’s professional center, while Fayetteville, home to the university, increasingly caters to students over career-seekers.

Toliver said many organizations in Fayetteville were looking for interns or students to shadow, not full-time staff.

Toliver is holding onto her student rental from her final semester, and when her lease ends, she will have to find housing in a new environment where non-student units often have widely different price tags.

“Now that I’m not a student, I’m able to see how many things are only available to students,” she said. “Trying to find apartments that aren’t student housing, but the prices being significantly higher because they expect everybody that’s not a student to be made of money — it was kind of crazy to see.”

Quain sees a similar pricing dilemma, with entry-level tech positions at the university starting around $40,000.

“It won’t be great,” she said. “You could survive in an apartment probably. But to actually start building savings and all those things you’re supposed to do when you start careers; that’s just so far outside the realm of possibility. People in their mid-careers are now finally starting to be able to save.”

Quain remembers graduating high school in 2010 and attending career counseling events. Advisors would hand out materials from universities across the state, advertising expected salaries for different fields. 

At the time, they listed $50,000 to $70,000 as a starting salary for a systems administrator. 

“But that’s what I make now,” Quain said,  “in the middle of my career, at the university that made those promises to kids.”

Quain studied computer science at Arkansas Tech University for three years before later enrolling at the U of A to study graphic design. While she did not leave with a degree, she said she would not be able to afford working as a graphic designer, not if she wanted “to have a house to live in.”

The pressure compounds beyond housing and wages. As rent rises in Fayetteville and young professionals begin to commute, they spend more on gas. They face higher food costs, and for those with student loan debt, the financial stress is even higher.

“Everything is so tight-budget and it’s just hard,” Toliver said. “I’ll make enough to pay my bills and my rent and my groceries, but I don’t have a lot left after that.”

John Folan, head of the Department of Architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, has been working on the area’s affordability crisis longer than most of his students have been alive.

Folan is the founder and director of the Urban Design Build Studio (UDBS). There, he has spent 25 years doing what he calls “public interest design,” creating housing solutions for communities that typically cannot access design services. He founded UDBS in Pittsburgh in 2008 then brought it to the UofA in 2019, focusing on the region’s housing gap for working individuals.

“That’s one of the areas where there’s the greatest need in this region,” Folan said.

The target population is essential workers earning roughly $16 to $18 per hour, which sits at around 38% of the area’s annual median income. These people staff schools, hospitals and service industries yet are systematically excluded from homeownership. 

UDBS used the “Design to Income Model,” disregarding what a home “should’ look like to focus on what a person in that income bracket can actually afford. 

“It’s a very hard target to hit,” Folan said. “What we’ve done is take a look at what land costs in this region, accept the cost of labor and materials as variables we can’t change, and back into a size of home that somebody can afford to have built. What it does is get them into a situation where they own a piece of land, they own a home, and they can see that home appreciate in value.”

Working backward from land costs and labor and materials, the studio landed on homes that are roughly 450 square feet on 1,000-square-foot land, allowing owners to expand their property if their finances allowed. This model varies from subsidized housing standards, which are typically capped at 1,200 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. It also avoids government reliance.

Mary Beth Mashburn, a 2021 architecture graduate, has worked as a UDBS fellow since graduating and brings a perspective that Folan cannot: living through the housing crisis.

After graduating, Mashburn rented for a period before she and her husband decided to buy, a decision driven in part by how high rent had climbed.

“One of the decisions that factored into it was rent getting to be so high that we’re paying the same amount to just buy a house,” Mashburn said. “Most of my friends still rent.”

In regards to the UDBS work, Mashburn said many people in this area are used to a lot of land and have to adjust to the density affordable housing requires. Folan said the responses to discussions about density are usually not well-received.

Folan is not the only person in NWA working to address housing and affordability issues. Mayor Molly Rawn formed a housing task force, and NWA leadership has implemented pilot zoning programs designed to encourage more varied housing types. UDBS is also developing a university-wide initiative called AR Home Colab, which would bring faculty from the law school, the Fulbright College, engineering, sociology and the Walton College of Business to develop housing solutions in partnership with the private sector.

“The potential exists,” Folan said. “The region understands these challenges.”

Walton Career Services data shows that approximately 40% of Walton graduates stay in NWA after graduating, while 60% leave.

Even Quain, who has spent her whole life in NWA said she has made the conclusion that young people would likely be better off starting their lives elsewhere.

“I would find a different place to settle down,” she said. “I feel like things aren’t going to materially change here. I think it’s only going to either stay the same at best or get worse. I hate to say that, but I’d find a medium-sized town I like that has the vibes I want, and I would try to build a life there before it gets too expensive.”

Quain said she has watched Fayetteville change from a small hub of arts and culture to a fast-growing metro – and she mourns what has been lost along the way. Spaces like Backspace, a venue on Dickson Street that featured square dancing and local bands, are gone, replaced by student housing. 

Her own building on Hill Avenue is being vacated, due to a university agreement to house graduate students. Residents were told to leave by May, offered $10,000 to go quietly, but they fought it at City Council. They won – but lost anyway when the university stepped in and decided to buy the whole place anyway.

Quain still remains hopeful, just in a different way. She thinks young people are dramatically underestimating their ability to make change through local civic participation.

“I’ve seen one person show up to a City Council meeting and change the whole discussion,” Quain said. “There are often no young people there at all. So even one person showing up and having an opinion makes a difference. You can find your council person’s email address. You can become friends with them. They want to help people.”

Toliver, still early in her career, said her advice to others navigating the same job market she did is expanding your horizons.

“I had it super specific at first, but then I was like, I need to branch out,” she said. “As long as I’m getting [a job] in my degree area or my level of expertise, I think that’s gonna help.”

Folan said young people who are coming out of school are entering an affordable housing crisis and carrying a much greater debt burden than someone from his generation.

“I very rarely run into a student these days that says one of their priorities is owning a home,” he said.

What young people prioritize instead – flexibility, travel, experience – may look like a simple preference. But it is also a response to a society and market where traditional metrics of success and stability now seem out of reach.

Quain has done the math. So has Toliver and an entire generation. And they are all arriving at the same answer.