They went to Chicago, Washington, D.C., Seattle or anywhere that wasn’t good ole’ “Michigan, My Michigan.” Surprisingly, when the government tries to tell people that the place they are running away from is “cool,” the people running tend to pick up the pace.

By 2009, 49 percent of recent MSU graduates and 53 percent of recent University of Michigan graduates were leaving the state — twice as many as in 2001.

This idea of the great “brain drain” from Michigan has been a reality in the back of my mind for my entire college career. I knew it existed, but I never thought I would be a member of the exodus. Michigan was my land flowing with milk and honey; I always knew that I would stay here after I graduated. All those graduates who left the state just didn’t understand Michigan and all that it had to offer.

But after living in Washington, D.C., a city that doesn’t need to be declared as “cool” because it actually is cool, I’ve realized I might want to leave Michigan myself. Cities such as D.C., New York and Chicago have everything we want as graduates, but two things in particular: high quality of life and public transit.

To see what our aspiring-to-be-cool state was doing about this, I wanted to learn more about the Cool Cities Initiative, to see if it had a chance to make a difference. Doing what a student of the 2010s has been bred to do, I Googled it. I hit a dead end at an out-of-date, “this domain name may be for sale by its owner” web page. Nothing says “cool” like dead web pages.

But eventually, I found a PDF version of a Powerpoint presentation — also the definition of the anti-cool — that had some surprising insights. It admitted the government cannot mandate cool, and research from a nonscientific survey revealed quality of life was significantly more important for recent graduates in determining a place to live, maybe even surpassing the importance of job opportunities.

Also, factors that were not critical in determining where we would go included places with year-round warm weather, professional sports teams, large malls and casinos.

And that brings me to the concept of transit. Our generation is one that puts a premium on economies of access rather than on economies of ownership.

We listen to music on Spotify and Pandora and watch instant-stream movies on Netflix and TV shows on Hulu. Give someone all three seasons of “Arrested Development” on DVD as a birthday present and you’ll be greeted with a puzzled look: “You know I can watch this for free, whenever I want, without sticking a disk into a machine, right?”

We surrender every last detail of our personalities and lives to our future overlords at Facebook in order to access what is the world’s largest communication network. We’ve hastened the arrival of bikeshares and companies such as Zipcar and Car2Go that offer vehicles only when we want them.

Cars are losing their “cool”, and it’s a hassle to have them. The share of 20-34 year-olds with a driver’s license is dropping and shows no signs of reversing. This is bad for Michigan twofold; we build cars — a market that is losing appeal — and we have no great transit alternatives.

Traveling the 10 miles from Old Town Alexandria, Va., to the U Street Corridor in D.C., — two of those “cool” places — takes less than half an hour on the D.C. Metro. That is half an hour in which I don’t have to take my eyes off of my phone, rather than the more than a half-hour drive it would take that I would be trying my best not to look at my phone.

The state of Michigan can attempt to create “cool cities” by offering grants to fix up parks or theaters, but the real way to become a place that we young folks want to live is to give us access to transit. Instead of subsidizing professional sports arenas to the tune of about $150 million — Comerica Park — or $220 million in the case of the Silverdome, which sold for about $550,000 in 2009 at an enormous loss, the state needs to invest in transit infrastructure.

I’ll be writing more about transit and the state of Michigan in future columns, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to convince myself and others that Michigan is a state worth staying in once we graduate. But the promised lands of D.C., Chicago, Vancouver and Toronto sure are singing a siren song that is hard to resist.

Bobby Busley is a guest columnist at The State News and an urban and regional planning senior. Reach him at busleyro@msu.edu.