[Will O' Wisp]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I don't see what's shocking. The number of college students is basically a function of the overall population. LA is larger than Houston, Dallas and Austin combined, so, not surprisingly, has more college students. Something like 70% of high school grads attend college these days.

Again, I don't understand what's so important about where people attend college. In most cases it has limited impact on a metro's economic prospects. The best "Wall Street" business school isn't in NYC, the best "innovation" university is nowhere near Silicon Valley, etc. People just move to jobs after college.

The biggest concentration of Harvard grads isn't in Boston. If Harvard moved to rural Maine, it probably wouldn't change things too much, both for the metro and the institution.

LA metro pop in 2018: 13,291,486
Dallas, Houston, Austin combined metro pop in 2018: 16,705,411

College students in LA: 974,013
College students in Houston and Dallas combined: 572, 922
Austin doesn't even rate to be included in the list, but if we assume it has 270,000 students (same as Huston at #10) LA still has over 100,000 more than all three combined.

Or put another way, Dallas is 4th in total population yet 7th in students. Houston is 5th in population and 10th in students. On a per capita basis, Texan cities are really losing out on the college game.

And that does effect the overall composition of the metro area. The majority of both LA and Texas' college students stay in their city after graduation. Interestingly Houston and Dallas are both slight better at retaining their graduates (66.1%/63.7% vs 62.9% for LA), but even then the vastly larger number of students in LA means it generates a far larger base of skilled workers. Just on these numbers we'd find that Dallas is adding 192,738 graduates to its workforce every year, and Houston 180,323 for a total of 373,061. But then LA is adding nearly double that at 612,654, and in a single metro area.

Now the real number is almost assuredly lower, that figure assumes every student graduates and every student gets a 4 year degree, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to say a company in LA can pull from a pool of college educated workers 3-4x larger than it could anywhere in Texas.

edit: Houston