What attracts and retains knowledge workers/students: The quality of place or career opportunities? The cases of Montreal and Ottawa

The creative class thesis of economic development has been influential in analyzing the mobility of human capital. The thesis has also had a major influence on the orientation of policies in North American cities regarding urban development aspects. Our aim is not to test this thesis of economic development as a whole but rather to use its quality of place criteria to evaluate how students enrolled in science and technology university programs decide where to live upon graduation. Using quantitative and qualitative material, this paper examines the influence of criteria related to quality of place and also to career opportunities concerning the mobility of students in science and technology who will soon be part of the professional category of the knowledge workers. Our hypothesis is that knowledge workers would be much more attracted by urban environments having more potential in terms of creativity, corresponding to the criterion emphasised in the creative class thesis. However, our results suggest that the quality of place is not as important as career opportunities. This does not lead us to refute the relevance of the creative class thesis but to nuance the relevance of various factors of location. It appears that the two cities in our study achieve different results on only one major point: the quality of life of Ottawa is a more powerful criterion of attraction/retention than in Montreal.