Geographic Segregation By Education 230
The wage gap between college-educated workers and those with just a high school diploma has been growing — and accelerating. But the education gap is also doing something unexpected: clustering workers with more education in cities with similar people. "This effectively means that college graduates in America aren't simply gaining access to higher wages. They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air." Most people are aware of the gentrification strife occurring in San Francisco, but it's one among many cities experiencing this. "[Research] also found that as cities increased their share of college graduates between 1980 and 2000, they also increased their bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, museums and art galleries per capita. And they experienced larger decreases in pollution and property crime, suggesting that cities that attract college grads benefit from both the kind of amenities that consumers pay for and those that are more intangible." The research shows a clear trend of the desirable cities becoming even more desirable, to the point where it's almost a necessity for city planners to lure college graduates or face decline.
Translation (Rough) (Score:2, Insightful)
"We want to be as wealthy and well-positioned as people who worked their asses off in their 20's even though we couldn't be bothered to educate ourselves after high school and spent our 20's living with our parents, partying, and having a sweet car that we could only afford because we lived with our parents."
Here's a thought: Teach your kids the concept of long-term goals... It worked wonders for me.
Re:Translation (Rough) (Score:4, Insightful)
We want to be as wealthy and well-positioned as people who worked their asses off in their 20's even though we couldn't be bothered to educate ourselves
Who says that people who did not go to college did not educate themselves? You think that college is the only way to get an education? Anyone with the skills should be able to get the job, regardless of what piece of paper they have or don't have.
Confusing cause and effect (Score:4, Insightful)
There's more restaurants because there are more high-income college grads to spend money there. There's less street crime because Johnny the Finance Douchebag isn't likely to do anything worse than public urination. (white collar crime is another matter)
As for better schools, hasn't happened yet at least in NYC -- the system is very uneven and the lengths parents will go through to get their kid in a better elementary school are legendary. Lose the battle, and welcome to the suburbs. If it does happen, it'll again be because the well-educated wealthy college students are there.
Cleaner air is mostly because there's little polluting industry left. Which means fewer blue-collar jobs.
The implied narrative that those rich overeducated scum are hogging all the good places and leaving the poor in high-crime areas with bad schools, dirty air, and no amenities gets cause and effect completely wrong.
Re:Chicken or egg? (Score:4, Insightful)
Education is funded by property taxes, not sales tax. In Austin, people are being priced out of their homes because they voted for every social program out there, and now the taxes are too damn high.
"I'm at the breaking point," said Gretchin Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8500 this year.
"It's not because I don't like paying taxes," said Gardner, who attended both meetings [of "irate homeowners"]. "I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can't afford to live here anymore."
-- Austin American-Statesman
Self-taught experts with holes in their knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)
The self-taught "experts" may not be complete dumbfucks, but they never have as complete of a body of knowledge as somebody who has actually even just tried to get some sort of a formal education in their chosen field.
I'm talking about the guy who maybe never even finished high school, but he read a couple of Ruby on Rails books, hacked together a simple blog system that kinda worked, and now he considers himself a computer science expert.
I've worked with enough of these self-proclaimed self-taught "experts" to have noticed some trends. One of the most singificant is that they have massive holes in what they know. They may know the basics of using a given programming language, but then they'll have no idea about security, or algorithms, or writing code that performs well. They won't know about Big-O notation and its implications. They don't know anything about relational theory and have no idea about the ACID principles, so they use NoSQL DBs, write what would be simple SQL queries using complex JavaScript code instead, and create "databases" that corrupt or lose data left and right.
The guy with the bachelor's degree may not be an expert, but at least he'll have likely heard at least something beyond the basics. He at least knows that an O(n^4) algorithm isn't going to scale well. He at least knows how to use foreign key constraints when designing a DB.
Hell, even the guy who only managed a couple of years of college before dropping out is probably a better candidate than the self-taught "expert" with no college experience whatsoever.
As an industry, we don't need yet another high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book thinking he's anything more than a shitty high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book. We need less such people, in fact.
Re:Self-taught experts with holes in their knowled (Score:2, Insightful)
The self-taught "experts" may not be complete dumbfucks, but they never have as complete of a body of knowledge as somebody who has actually even just tried to get some sort of a formal education in their chosen field.
Most college graduates are money-seeking who don't understand anything, too.
I'm talking about the guy who maybe never even finished high school, but he read a couple of Ruby on Rails books, hacked together a simple blog system that kinda worked, and now he considers himself a computer science expert.
So in other words, you're comparing completely ignorant idiots to people who got some amount of formal education. Not a big surprise there. On the other hand, people who do self-education right...
I hope you're not using these people to deride all autodidacts. The self-taught "experts" you speak of are barely self-taught at all, so the comparison isn't really valid.
As an industry, we don't need yet another high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book thinking he's anything more than a shitty high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book. We need less such people, in fact.
As an industry, we also don't need more shitty college graduates who have no idea what they're doing (the majority). And no, not even they understand things like Big-O notation and its implications, because pretty much all they cared about was getting a degree, and the colleges were happy to take their money.
If I seem hostile, it's only because I've seen people lump in idiots who barely even tried to self-educate with people who worked hard to educate themselves. In my mind, I separate college students who go there almost solely to get a degree (in other words, brainwashed losers) and college students who go there to get a better understanding of the universe around them. Why can't others do the same?
Re:this is a good thing (Score:1, Insightful)
can we really quit bitching about people who make something of themselves???
Many people have a "zero-sum" mental model of economics. They believe that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world, and therefore, if some become richer, others must become poorer. Although some people become rich through corruption and rent-seeking, most get there by creating wealth rather than just concentrating what was already there. Rather than pushing others down, they pull others up by creating jobs and demand. But there are plenty of people that don't see it that way. Enough to support political parties and governing majorities based on their misguided beliefs.
Re:Why is location irrelevant for some groups? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, art galleries (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people in urban centers spend most of their time going to libraries, zoos, museums & art centers? Most of those "bigots" from rural areas go out of their way and consider it a privilege to go to urban centers and experience those things. Many in those urban centers that could walk or drive to them in under 20 minutes rarely if ever go. I grew up in a rural area and my childhood was filled with trips to the Toledo Zoo, Washington DC, Cape Canaveral, various space & history centers, and my family was far from well off (farmer, UPS driver, McDonalds, Backhoe operator, Walmart is a rough employment history of my parents). I've seen people living out in the sticks with far more culture than some living a block from a major library/museum.
Moving is more natural (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely right. I grew up in an economically disadvantaged area, went to college, and settled in one of the best-performing metro areas in the country. My classmates who skipped college are still there, driving 1-2 hours each way to the closest job they can find, and enduring the double disadvantages of lacking a college degree and living in a depressed area.
When one is living dangerously close to the poverty line, moving away from friends and family will be perceived as unacceptable risky. Only the most ambitious will leave, and most of those people went to college anyway.
Re:Translation (Rough) (Score:4, Insightful)
> intellectual masturbation, like philosophy
Yeah, fuck Frege, Russell, and Quine. What did they ever do for a real discipline, like computer science?
Oh wait...
Dual-income couples drive this! (Score:5, Insightful)
At least here in Norway this trend probably started even earlier, but we have a significantly larger proportion of dual-income university-educated couples. (This trend is supported by our one-year parents leave with pay, where the parents have to share this time, and by public kindergartens when the children are a little older.)
I suspect that a strong driver for this big city concentration is the fact that most couples meet sometime during their university studies, and when this switched from being men getting their MSc's meeting the girls from the nursing schools, to being men & women at the same university, they would have really strong incentives to try to settle in a city with a big enough employer base that both would have multiple job alternatives.
I.e. my wife & I have lived in Oslo for almost 30 years now, we have always had lots of employment options, while my youngest brother and his wife live in a far smaller town:
In their area it has significantly harder to locate alternate (and interesting) employment when bad times hit the company one of them worked at.
Terje