America's educated and elite workers are concentrating in an handful of cities, and none of them are in the Great Lakes, according to Richard Florida's latest column in the Atlantic.
The number of Americans holding a graduate degree has more than doubled, Florida reports, in the past 30 years. So, in 2004, magnet cities like San Francisco counted about half of their residents holding a college degree. But Midwest cities like Detroit and Cleveland, by sharp contrast, counted 11 and 14 percent respectively. When the discussion turns to graduate degrees, the numbers get even bleaker for the Great Lakes region.
But that's not the worst of it for the Great Lakes. Young, talented workers, it turns out, are not only attracted to hip cities with convenient transit, happenin nightlife, and cool public spaces - amenties absent from most Great Lakes cities. They also seem to favor places where the crowds of their peers are congregating. And that's not in the Great Lakes either, which means that - absent an aggressive strategy to change traditional development and patterns - the region is at risk of falling even further behind in the global race for creative workers.
