Tips for the Class of 2020's job hunt: Try these 15 cities -- and cyberspace

What are the best U.S. cities for new college graduates to consider when starting a career? Traditionally, LinkedIn's studies (and lots of other analyses) have highlighted well-known economic hubs such as New York, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.

But these are not normal times.

Overall U.S. unemployment is running at 14.7%. The largest metros are in the very early stages of figuring out how to reopen safely after massive shutdowns designed to slow the spread of Covid-19. There's some hiring going on -- but there's also an abundance of caution about what zigzags might lie ahead before normal conditions resume.

Brian Xu, one of my colleagues on LinkedIn's Economic Graph team, last week pulled together a fascinating analysis of 15 U.S. metro areas that seem well suited to turbulent times. All these locations offer relatively high pay for software engineers, nurses, salespeople and other types of jobs within reach for new college grads. Yet they're also urban areas where rent takes an unusually small bite of one's paycheck.

St. Louis elbows its way to the top of this list. It and other Midwestern cities capture nine of the top 15 spots. Sunbelt cities such as Phoenix and Durham, N.C., hold the other six spots. The allure of all these locations is that if things go well, you're earning a good income. And if unexpected interruptions come along, your housing costs aren't slicing up your savings at an alarming rate.

For a full list of these cities, see this recent edition of the LinkedIn Workforce Report. That article has attracted a flurry of comments from residents and recent grads calling out their favorite cities. Among my favorites: Natalie Shoemaker's salute to Cincinnati as "a great city to live in as a young professional," combining all the opportunities and events of a big city "while still keeping the small town, neighborly feel."

Meanwhile, this chart highlights some of the standout cities and shows the rent burden elsewhere.

Jeff Eads, associate director of employer relations at Ball State University, in Muncie, Ind., added a valuable insight to the data picture when we spoke last week.

As Eads points out, the past few months' abrupt switch to work-from-home is inspiring a lot of employers to think more positively about relying on remote workers to a greater extent. That means it may be easier than ever to settle into an affordable city -- and still line up a remote-work arrangement that lets you draw a New York (or Chicago) salary from an employer that might be 1,000 miles away.

Ready to put that idea into action? Check out LinkedIn's current job listings with the work "remote" in the title or description. There were more than 19,000 on Sunday, May 24, and new ones keep coming in. Opportunities look abundant in marketing and writing, but the overall possibilities range from data science to user experience.

Jeffrey Moss has been connecting college students and potential employers for short, remote-work assignments since 2015. He's the founder and CEO of Parker Dewey, a college-to-career matchmaking service that helps set up short projects, known as micro-internships, for students.

In the past few months, Moss told me, he's seen a huge surge in students seeking micro-internships as a way of re-engaging with a campus-hiring market that otherwise seems broken. Going forward, he predicts, such online-driven marketplaces may become an even more important way for employers and college talent to connect.

The big career fairs of years gone by -- crammed into campus gyms or hotel ballrooms -- just don't seem in step with even the scaled-down social-distancing standards that are likely to be part of American interactions for many months to come, Moss observes.

Companies already are discovering how much work can get done remotely, thanks to advances in video-conferencing and other communications tools. Employers in tech, real estate and even consumer goods are signaling that their future workplaces will be split, more than ever, between onsite and remote.

That's likely to create more opportunities for new grads to conduct parallel searches for appealing, livable homes -- and dynamic employers -- without needing both to be in the same metro area.