A quick computer search on the term "brain drain" shows how serious a problem people think it is just about everywhere.

I'm not talking about the feeling you get at the end of a day of hard work followed by an evening of wrestling with the kids, trying to help them with homework. That's a different sort of brain drain, another column for another day. No, this one involves the notion that the smartest and most promising young people in any particular geographic area are systematically leaving to build their lives elsewhere.

It's hard to find a state where people don't think this is happening to them. It's also hard to find a Third World country where the problem doesn't rank as one of the top impediments to progress. Many of these people are, no doubt, right.

But as the Utah Foundation, a nonprofit research group, made clear with a study released last week, people in Utah are not among them.

That will no doubt come as a surprise to many, including a few members of the state Legislature. It also ought to serve as a reminder that solutions are most effective when applied to actual problems.

The Utah Foundation surveyed 900 graduates from Utah's public and private colleges and universities in 2004 and found that 71 percent of those who were native Utahns to begin with ended up staying in the state. But the 29 percent who left were covered quite nicely by the 39 percent of students who came here from elsewhere and decided to stay.

Because some state lawmakers are upset that tax dollars are being used to help educate students who subsequently leave, the foundation also decided to view the results by public institutions only, eliminating BYU and Westminster College. Looking at it this way, fully 76 percent of native Utah students stayed after receiving a degree at a public school, and 46 percent of the non-natives stayed. That isn't quite a wash. It represents a net drain of about 13 percent. But as the survey notes, this is "probably not large enough to be considered a brain drain."

This is important information. Two months ago a legislative tax study committee briefly toyed with the idea of slapping a tax on people who graduate from a public college or university and then go to another place to live. The idea was to recoup some of the difference between the lower in-state tuition they were allowed to pay and the higher out-of-state tuition someone from a different state would have paid.

In legislative terms, it was one of those occasional ideas that are shot into the air like an eager firecracker, only to fall to the ground as a dud. All it did was generate a few jokes among more pragmatic lawmakers.

But the idea that Utah was somehow losing something lingered in the air like stagnant smoke — until now.