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Posted May 30, 2012, 11:58 PM
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Well-Educated Flock to Some Cities, Leaving Others Behind
Well-Educated Flock to Some Cities, Leaving Others Behind
May 30, 2012
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/us...d.html?_r=2&hp
Quote:
DAYTON, Ohio — As cities like this one try to reinvent themselves after losing large swaths of their manufacturing sectors, they are discovering that one of the most critical ingredients for a successful transformation — college graduates — is in perilously short supply. Just 24 percent of the adult residents of metropolitan Dayton have four-year degrees, well below the average of 32 percent for American metro areas, and about half the rate of Washington, the country’s most educated metro area, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. Like many Rust Belt cities, it is a captive of its rich manufacturing past, when well-paying jobs were plentiful and landing one without a college degree was easy.
- Dayton sits on one side of a growing divide among American cities, in which a small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates, and the rest struggle to keep those they have. The winners are metro areas like Raleigh, N.C., San Francisco, and Stamford, Conn., where more than 40 percent of the population has a college degree. Metro areas like Bakersfield, Calif., Lakeland, Fla., and Youngstown, Ohio, where less than a fifth of the population has a college degree, are being left behind. The divide shows signs of widening as college graduates gravitate to places with a lot of other college graduates and the atmosphere that creates. “This is one of the most important developments in recent economic history of this country,” said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who recently published a book on the topic, “The New Geography of Jobs.”
- Historically, most American cities have had relatively similar shares of college graduates, in part because fewer people went to college. In 1970, the difference between the most-educated and least-educated cities, in terms of the portion of residents with four-year degrees, was 16 percentage points, and nearly all metro areas were within 5 points of the average. Today the spread is double that, and only half of all metro areas are within 5 points of the average, the Brookings research shows. “There’s a relentless cycle in which knowledge breeds knowledge, but the flip side is that many places are left out,” said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at Brookings who conducted the analysis.
- In a pattern that is part education, part family background, college graduates tend to have longer life expectancies, higher household incomes, lower divorce rates and fewer single-parent families than those with less education, and cities where they cluster tend to exhibit those patterns more strongly. Montgomery County, where Dayton is located, has a premature death rate that is more than double that of Fairfax County, Va., the highly educated Washington suburb, according to Bridget Catlin, a University of Wisconsin researcher. Now, Dayton is racing to produce, attract and retain college graduates as a badly needed food for its hungry economy. But it is a painstaking process. Kate Geiger, who lost her job at General Motors in 2008, said she would never forget the feeling of sitting in a college classroom for the first time after 24 years on the factory floor.
- Charlotte, once a city with very little education, now has a population that is more than a third college graduates. Ms. Shomaker estimated that 60 percent of her friends were moving to other cities. Dayton’s past was rich, but by the 2000s the city was in trouble. It lost half of its manufacturing jobs in 12 years, according to Richard Stock, an economist at the University of Dayton. When the city’s last Fortune 500 company, National Cash Register, left in 2009, residents were jolted into action. “Our premise is you have to change people’s mind-set,” said Thomas Lasley, the former dean of education at the University of Dayton, who runs Learn to Earn, the city’s effort to increase its share of college graduates. “We have to go from one where people think of themselves as being in a high-school-attending culture to being in a college-attending culture.”
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Since we live in a democracy, this type of redistribution will keep these towns on indefinite life support, the urban equivalent of Terri Schiavo.
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