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.
Moving is more natural (Score:5, Interesting)
My observation is that people who don't go to college tend to get a job locally. People who do go to college often attend a college outside of the local area, and when they graduate, often apply for jobs nationwide.
The process of going to college makes moving to a new location much more natural.
It's no wonder that college grads will move to places where they can get good jobs, and that this would be places that already have a high concentration of people with college degrees.
Or maybe ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... the college education included acquiring the desire to move to such places?
Personally, I don't consider places like NYC or SF to be desirable places to live. "Clean air"? "Low crime?" "Better schools?" Certainly, compared to other "cities of size". But, to me, the choice isn't limited to which "big city" to live in. And those criteria work to exclude larger cities, in my opinion.
bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, art galleries (Score:5, Interesting)
If that's your cup of tea, and you've the good fortune to select a profession that pays the bills your entire life in your chosen metropolis, I say more power to you. Others may find solace in living more simple, rural lives.
Remember, much of the benefit of higher wages is just more money passing through your hands to accommodate the cities' higher cost of living.
NYC (Score:4, Interesting)
less crime? OK. clearner air? compared to....? NYC is a big place - its not just Manhattan or the upper East (or West) side. In fact, you might make the argument in reverse when it comes to NYC, that lower "skilled" workers are clustering there and getting the benefits described.
Chicken or egg? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, lots of educated (and wealthy) citizens create markets for better services in cities. But decades of surveys of companies planning locations and of educated workers considering relocation tell us it works the other way around, too.
States like Arizona and Texas that base their plans for attracting high-wage (lots of educated employees) employers on cutting taxes usually do it by also slicing schools and other services.
That seems to be working in places like Austin, where the city makes up for the lack of State support for education (or actual hostility to it) by cranking up local sales taxes -- which fall more on the poor than on the affluent. Which is a sweet deal if you're making serious money as a twenty-something in technology there, but might not look so good when you have kids and you're looking for daycare and primary schools.
We're doing the experiment. Check in again in ten or twenty years to see which way the arrow of cauality runs.
Re:Translation (Rough) (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently you never went to college.
Most four-year college kids aren't in technical program. They're in liberal arts programs. Typically they have lots of trouble getting up early enough to get to a 10 AM class, and bitch and moan that an 8-hour day is required to earn an A. They spend most of their time getting drunk and getting laid, and call it "networking." They spend a significant proportion of their study time debating fields that are (pretty much by definition) intellectual masturbation, like philosophy or theology. Then they go home and spend a few years on the couch waiting for the economy to improve, and/or frantically trying to get into grad school. They don't actually enter a field where the boss expects you to there at 8 AM every day until they hit their late 20s. And I know this because I went to a four-year-college for Histyory and Political Science, and then spent a year-and-a-half in Grad School; and ended up with absolutely no marketable skills.
OTOH, HS-educated kid tend to get thrown out at 18. Most of my co-workers at Home Depot had their own places, which they got with no help from Mom at all, at that age. The ones actually in their 20s generally have really shitty 10-year-old car, or no cars at all. The younger ones tend not to work a full 40 hours, because the company really prefers the scheduling flexibility four part-timers get you to two full-timers; and if you;re around a couple years you generally get full-time; but they are there at 6 AM when their schedule says "be there at 6 AM," and they stay until 10 PM on those days. Almost alkl of them have to do one of these a week, so they don;t have anything a middle-class person would call a "sleep schedule."
Re:Translation (Rough) (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody in their right mind would hire Steve Jobs for an entry level position. You can be tyrannical and refuse to listen to anybody else ONLY if you are in charge.
Re:Self-taught experts with holes in their knowled (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny...as someone doing the hiring and firing for my company and another for the last 20 years....the top developers we've had have by and large been self taught programmers(many with degrees in something unrelated, like business or biology, or none at all). We get way too many guys with MS in CS who can't fucking use source control properly or talk to their fellow man. Sorry, the software development labs that have sprung up in my alma mater and CS departments around the nation to teach software engineering practices vs. just cs knowledge are little more than the zealotry/whims of the professors/ta's running them. And they can't teach what is really needed....self learning and getting things done.
If you are hiring good people they will know when an optimization is needed and when it isn't and design/build accordingly. Maybe you're hiring practices are the problem?
Also, the most stark difference i see between reality out there and your statement is the DB knowledge. Hands down, CS graduates...the higher the GPA..the more shit they are at any type of real DB implementation. Never understood that, but your statement just reminded me of that.