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Education Stats Science

Geographic Segregation By Education 230

Posted by Soulskill from the philosophy-majors-in-philly,-music-majors-in-singapore dept.
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.
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Geographic Segregation By Education More

Geographic Segregation By Education

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  • "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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 13, 2014 @07:30AM (#47442089)

      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.

      • Self-taught experts with holes in their knowledge (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 13, 2014 @08:14AM (#47442257)

        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: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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

        • What I want to know, why are people modding up such an opinionated piece of drivel from an anon coward? This so called debate is old and sad. People choose to learn what they think is important. Most employers seem to think getting the work done FAST and not blowing things up is important. I have worked for employers for 20 years now and taught myself what I needed to know. I also went to school and took calc, chem, physics, have read constantly for my whole life, whatever, it didn't have a damn thing to do with what I work on now or my approach to learning. That started from when I was young, not college. So this talk of making a big distinction between those who go to college/university and those who do not, is "uneducated" and a false start to any conversation.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        Kind of like saying you can become an astronaut as a highschool drop out. Yes, technically you could have the skill and self educate, but who in their right mind would even consider such a person? Risk is way too high.

        In theory, you don't need to go to college, but in practice, humans can't predict the future and people without degree are higher risk. Not worth it.

    • Re:Translation (Rough) (Score:4, Interesting)

      by NicBenjamin ( 2124018 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @08:36AM (#47442341)

      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:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 13, 2014 @09:42AM (#47442603)

        > intellectual masturbation, like philosophy

        Yeah, fuck Frege, Russell, and Quine. What did they ever do for a real discipline, like computer science?

        Oh wait...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jahoda ( 2715225 )
        This post says a great deal more about the kind of person *you* are and decisions *you* have made than it does anything else.
    • I'm confused, do you think that college is harder than working a manual labor job for 8-10 hours a day? Because it's not. It's much easier than pretty much any real job. Why else is college synonymous with drinking and partying? Unfortunately, many people can't afford to go to college because of exorbitant tuition prices. Not everyone has mommy and daddy that can pay it for them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )

        many people can't afford to go to college because of exorbitant tuition prices

        Don't worry, it seems the more expensive a University is, the worse the quality of the education. Go find a nice tax supported state Uni. Mine had a 90% in-state discount and the other 10% was easily covered loans or one of the many state grants. TONS of state grants. If you ignore food and housing, college is virtually free for any family making making average income.

  • Moving is more natural (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @07:31AM (#47442095) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      On the flip side, if/when those college-educated people decide to have kids, they will find that having family nearby is a huge help. Roughly half of the college-educated parents in my generation (out of those I know well) moved to be near their parents specifically to make childcare easier. This often means a bit of career back-tracking, as they come up to speed in a different area of their field, or change to a significantly different industry.

    • Moving is more natural (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jmstuckman ( 561420 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @09:40AM (#47442591) Journal

      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.

    • Also, the premise of this is a little silly to begin with. Wouldn't you need to analyze what percentage of people with college degrees CAME from cities vs. rural areas, and then compare the percentage that GO to cities vs. rural areas and determine whether there is a significant difference?

  • Or maybe ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @07:40AM (#47442111) Homepage

    ... 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.

    • You need to look at crime stats on a per 100K basis. NYC is lower than not just "big" cities but also small ones of the 100K variety.

      • I just did, at least for my state, and while there are of course some cities that do have higher crime rates than NYC (21) a VAST majority have lower, and in many cases far lower, crime rates than NYC (~580). Even sorting out all of the "small" cities (anything below 70,000) still shows only 5 cities with higher rates (One being Detroit) and 12 with lower rates. Of those 12 cities with lower rates 8 have half is violent crime rate (639.3). NYC may not be terrible crime wise, but its still not great eithe

        • Don't just look at "violent" crime rates. Look at property rates too. NYC is one of the lowest out there regardless of size. What source are you using? in 2012 per the UCR database, of agencies in populations > 100K NYC ranked # 97 in violent crime rate and #272 in property crime rates (both out of 287 reporting) For murders it is #131, Even robbery (as opposed to burglary) it is only ranked #74.

  • bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, art galleries (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @07:45AM (#47442131) Journal
    Yes. The pinnacle of civilized living.

    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.

    • It depends on what you mean by "cost of living." It is actually much easier to be poor in a city than in a rural area. Public transportation means that you don't have to own a car or pay for gas/insurance. You have much easier access to social services, food banks, etc. You can survive on a lot less money in the city than in more isolated areas. The problem comes when you start to want more space.

      • Public transportation means that you don't have to own a car or pay for gas/insurance.

        Unless you get an ultimatum that if you don't come into work on one of the 58 days a year when buses don't run, you'll lose your job. In my city, this includes New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the first Sunday of the year, the second Sunday of the year, ..., and the fifty-second Sunday of the year.

        • Do you live in Europe? In the US it is exceedingly rare for public transit to be closed on holidays. So much so that I have never heard of a city where it happens.

        • You're in midwest, right? You need a car unless you're in a HUGE city, because smaller cities have gaps in their transit. Though hopefully employers would keep those gaps in mind.

          • Oh, for mod points to score the parent as "funny."

            • I'm not trying to be funny, Tepples has hinted that he can't/doesn't drive which might be a a bit of a problem if he tries to pursue a career in professional game development.

              Unless you're referring to my reference to employers taking into account the gaps in public transportation for those employees who use it. Yes I know they probably don't....but they "should"

  • NYC (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lawrence_Bird ( 67278 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @07:48AM (#47442135) Homepage

    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.

  • " We've always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, ." -- Mitt Romney

  • For true equality we need collectivization, or genocide, whichever comes first.

    • I thought the same thing. They seems to be comparing cities to other cities, and completely ignoring all other places you might choose to live.

  • Confusing cause and effect (Score:4, Insightful)

    by russotto ( 537200 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @07:53AM (#47442157) Journal

    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.

    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.

  • Chicken or egg? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by overshoot ( 39700 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @08:02AM (#47442191)

    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:Chicken or egg? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @08:13AM (#47442251) Homepage

      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

      • "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."

        Ha... cause and effect is a bitch sometimes, isn't it? No doubt she thought all those things would be paid for by other people. If she thought at all.

      • Re:Chicken or egg? (Score:5, Informative)

        by thrich81 ( 1357561 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @11:51AM (#47443189)

        " 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." -- commonly stated, but bullshit and contradicted by the facts. I own two houses in the Austin area -- one near downtown Austin which I rent out, and one in Williamson County near Cedar Park (suburban, bedroom community to Austin, the anti-Austin politically) where I live. When the two houses were at near identical values the total property taxes on the Williamson County house were HIGHER than the Austin house. The county taxes and and school district taxes were about the same. The Austin Community College taxes were the same. The difference was that the taxes of the Municipal Utility District (entity formed by developers to provide utility services in unincorporated areas normally provided by cities) were higher than the City of Austin taxes. So for the same level of services, I pay more in taxes to the MUD than I would have to the city of Austin -- actually I get fewer services because the MUD has no libraries or "social programs" as Austin has.
        The reason that people are being priced out of their homes in Austin is because it is such a desirable place to live that property values are going up rapidly -- my house in Austin has appreciated by a factor of four since I bought it in 1996. Perhaps all those improvements the people of Austin voted for did contribute to the problem because they help to make it such a desirable place to live.

      • Bingo. And this level of ignorance is even more well defined in the people fleeing high cost states to enjoy lower cost Texas. They will complain about their state, taking no culpability in causing it by voting for decades of mismanagement, and then come here to Texas. Of course, since they do not recognize why their original state is a mess, they continue to advocate for the same crap here, especially in Austin.

  • More bars, more restaurants, and more dry cleaners makes my point. Bars are negative. Eating in restaurants is negative. And forget dry cleaners! Bars are a disaster as alcohol is now seen as the greatest killer in America. Restaurants are part of the health and obesity epidemic. And dry cleaning should be illegal. Not only are the chemicals used bad for the environment but imagine the transportation required for people to run back and forth to get their laundry. A city is nothing more than a cancer whi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      If you got rid of all jobs like that, you would be left with everyone being a farmer, and we don't need that many. If everyone was unemployed, we'd have massive crime.

  • If you've fallen in love with the Walt Disney World experience, you now have the option to live in a town designed by Disney itself: Celebration, Florida. Resembling "Main Street, USA" and the "EPCOT World Showcase" writ large, Celebration helps blur the distinction between between Disney and real life, effectively letting you live in a theme park.

    Know who doesn't live in Celebration, Florida and its mean income over $75k/yr? The people who work in Celebration, Florida.

    It's not hard to find new developme

  • The article only discusses domestic segregation, but the elephant in the room is national differences.

    If global warming becomes as bad as they say, many heavily populated areas of the world (think India) will become too unproductive to support their population. Other areas (think Canada or Scandanavia) will become more habitable. Clearly the only humane policy will be totally open borders and to allow unlimited migration globally. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

    My point is simpl

  • Is this really about education or is it just self-selection based on wealth? People have noticed the latter for thousands of years.

  • ... or just an ongoing occurrence that is becoming more visible due to the larger amount of data available for analysis?

  • Isn't this common knowledge? (Score:3)

    by whizbang77045 ( 1342005 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @10:17AM (#47442739)
    I really thought this was rather obvious, and that everyone already knew it, whether they discussed it or not.

  • 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.

    I drew a different conclusion from this article. I know the article's focus was on attracting college graduates so that the city can prosper, but I instead considered the contrapositive: If a city is not prospering, then it has a lower-than-average percentage of college graduates. I see it as another confirmation of r [wikipedia.org]

  • Dual-income couples drive this! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Terje Mathisen ( 128806 ) on Sunday July 13, 2014 @11:55AM (#47443213)

    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

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