Living in the Emerald City

Recent articles in the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly have addressed the phenomenon of how educated professionals have migrated to select metropolitan areas in the U.S. over the past 25-30 years. In particular, Richard Florida's analysis in the Atlantic Monthly graphically demonstrates how the proportion of college educated adults has become concentrated in about 20 metropolitan areas in the nation. (One look at the color-coded maps in the article will convince you that there indeed has been a sea change going on across rural and older industrial counties throughout the nation.) Florida calls this the "means migration" and I agree with him that it has profound implications for the economic and social well-being of this country.

Educated people with professional skills and access to financial resources will always vote with their feet. For the majority of my adult life, I have witnessed countless college and law school colleagues move to places that increase their access to talent, employment opportunities and resources that enable them to live their preferred lifestyle. Like seeking like means that more educated affluent people now live in places with people like them where they fit the prevailing standards. It also means that educated professionals have more opportunities to connect and generate opportunities with other similarly talented people.

The end result of this concentration is a stark geographic disparity between select regions of highly educated residents and wide sections of the country where the proportion of educated affluent people is much lower. I have lived in both types of places -- New York, Ann Arbor and Minneapolis as examples of the former, Oklahoma City and Syracuse as examples of the latter. I know where I felt more comfortable, more connected to the kinds of people who shared my life experiences and values, more able to create opportunities to build the kind of life I was educated to lead. I also observe this phenomenon with the law students with whom I work. Many of the most talented are interested in practicing in one of the major coastal legal markets or staying in places like Chicago or Minneapolis in the Midwest. Employers outside of these areas actively seek the talented graduates of this law school, but face many obstacles to convincing those not originally from those areas to start there careers there. I have also observed how a place like the Twin Cities has drained large numbers of educated people across all types of professions from the rural communities of greater Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa and Wisconsin.

I don't regret the choices that I and my cohorts have made over the past two decades. Part of the payoff to years of hard work, education and student debt is being able to have the flexibility to create the life one wants. However, something has also been lost in the process. Gone are the small rural communities where professionals like doctors and lawyers lived with school teachers, auto mechanics and postal workers. That kind of class and educational diversity is now absent from wide swaths of the country. It also has meant that less affluent communities are even more hard pressed to improve their lot because they can't compete for access to the very types of educated people who could help turn these communities around.

In the end, this may just be the reality of a world in which commerce and idea creation no longer are limited by political and geographic boundaries. In order to compete in the global economy, regions, not just states or countries, need to have the kind of intellectual infrastructure to offer the kind of distinctive "thought capital" that commands a premium in the marketplace. At the same time, we can't throw up our hands and roll up the streets of Detroit, Utica, and Devils Lake, ND. How we harness both the concentration of educated metropolitan areas and try to reinvent the places left behind probably is one of the more important, yet hidden challenges facing this country.