Posted on 02/14/2011 7:06:40 AM PST by SeekAndFind
For a decade now U.S. city planners have obsessively pursued college graduates, adopting policies to make their cities more like dense hot spots such as New York, to which the "brains" allegedly flock.
But in the past 10 years "hip and cool" places like New York have suffered high levels of domestic outmigration. Some boosters rationalize this by saying the U.S. is undergoing a "bipolar migration"--an argument recently laid out by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. On the one hand the smart "brains" head for cool, coastal cities like New York and Boston, while "families" and "feet"--a term that seems to apply to the less cognitively gifted--trudge to the the nation's southern tier--a.k.a. the Sun Belt--for cheap prices and warm weather. "College graduates with bachelor's degrees or higher," Thompson notes, "have been moving to the coasts, like salmon swimming against the southwesterly current."
However, this analysis--no matter how widely accepted in the media--is grossly oversimplified, even misleading. Indeed, college graduates, for the most part, are heading not to big cities on the coasts, but to smaller, less dense and quite often Sun Belt cities.
To come up with our list of the country's biggest brain magnets, we took the 50 largest metropolitan areas and ranked them by gains in people with college educations compared to the population over 25 years of age between 2007 and 2009, using the latest data from the American Community Survey provided by demographer Wendell Cox. It turns out that none of the top 10 gainers were large Northeastern cities, but largely Southern or Midwestern. New Orleans; Raleigh, N.C.; Austin, Texas; Nashville; Birmingham, Ala.; Kansas City, Mo.-Kan.; and Columbus, Ohio, all scored high marks. Only one California city, San Diego, made the top 10. Perennial "brain gainers" Denver, Colo., and Seattle round out the top 10.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Which begs the question -— what ever happened to Silicon Valley and Wall Street? These were the traditional brain magents during the boom times.
Here’s another question -— is Washington DC considered a brain magent?
The underlying mistake is confusing college graduates with
brains. The two don’t go hand in hand much in the last 20 years.
Let’s look at the success of the cities where these “brains” seem to be gathering.
They shouldn’t lump all college graduates together.
Scientists, engineers, accountants, etc. would indicate a growing private sector more than sociologists, psychologists, and public health graduates.
I’m guessing that New Orleans, for example, has received leftie do-gooders looking for government and NGO jobs. These folks will just make a bad situation worse.
Pity the black underclass when the disciples of Che and Kos show up to “organize” them.
I understand that we should not confuse being a mere college grad with being intelligent.
But doesn’t this list tell us where the jobs are growing and where most of the opportunities are today?
Absolutely, if you are talking about sh*t for brains.
The metric used rewards those places with poorly-educated native populations, since it compares the per-capita education level of recent immigrants to that of long-time residents. Silicon Valley is already populated largely by college graduates so it is harder for it to gain any as a percentage. They still need nannys, dishwashers, and lawn guys after all.
The question is which jobs, private sector or government?
Any college grad heading to those cities is welcome to congregate in those cities.
Leave serious thought and decision making to those who choose red cities and states.
careful there...
The people who work on the Hill are really quite smart. Often misguided, but smart.
What isn’t really understood is that technically, Northern Virginia is very sophisticated in electronics, networking, systems integration, and yes, more than a little high end integrated circuit fabrication. It’s generally for the DOD and Intel side of things. Even political DC doesn’t wrap its mind around it.
careful there...
The people who work on the Hill are really quite smart. Often misguided, but smart.
What isn’t really understood is that technically, Northern Virginia is very sophisticated in electronics, networking, systems integration, and yes, more than a little high end integrated circuit fabrication. It’s generally for the DOD and Intel side of things. Even political DC doesn’t wrap its mind around it. And they don’t talk much about it.
They’re all running to Raleigh to work at Starbucks.
Just ask my friend’s son who graduated from NC State two years ago with an engineering B.S., and is performing 12-hour QA shifts (for a temp agency)—for the same pay I got doing the same work TWELVE years ago.
Come on down, grads! Trader Joe’s is hiring!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.