Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Rise of the Post-College Town

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by

James A. Bacon
in ,

millennials

Every community covets the Millennials, especially those with education, skills and tech savvy who do so much to stimulate entrepreneurial economic growth. USA Today has surveyed the coutry to see which “cities” (urban core jurisdictions, not metro regions) do the best job of luring Millennials. And it turns out that Virginia cities do pretty well.

Arlington tops the list (even though it’s a county and not a city), while Alexandria ranked No. 3. No surprise there. But how about this — Norfolk scored 13th out of the 288 cities surveyed and Richmond scored 18th.

As is always the case, semantic confusion surrounds the use of the word “city.” Chesapeake and Virginia rank disappointingly low on the list. But Chesapeake and Virginia Beach are not urban-core jurisdictions; under Virginia’s unique system of government, they are classified as cities even though their sociological profiles are all suburban. They are bedroom communities geared to households raising children, not urban hipsters.

Greg Toppo and Paul Overberg with USA describes a trend they describe as the “post-college town” — places where college grads head to look for a job and sink roots.

This is a new kind of city, born of deep demographic shifts and the power of technology. Where traditional college towns have long attracted young people who get an education and then leave, another kind of town is emerging: the post-college town.

“These places seem to be built for people, not for automobiles,” says University of Nevada-Las Vegas demographer Robert Lang. “And the 20-somethings love the people, not the automobile.”

The USA Today rankings are based on the ratio of the number of people 20-29 to the number of teens. Cities with high ratios suggest that a large number of Millennials have moved in. Some high rankers are to be expected — Cambridge, Mass. (No. 2.), San Francisco (No. 5) and Seattle (No. 6). But there some surprises like Tallahassee, Fla., Fargo, N.D., Springfield, Mo. — not to mention Norfolk and Richmond, which few people regard as magnets for young people.

Virginia has many, many problems, as Bacon’s Rebellion bloggers make abundantly clear. But the ability of Virginia cities to attract and retain educated young people bodes well for the future of the Old Dominion.

— JAB

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6 responses to “Rise of the Post-College Town”

  1. chris bonney Avatar
    chris bonney

    We’ve been puzzling over these data down here for a while. While we’d like to think that what the indicate is true, we’re not taking that on faith just yet because the evidence suggests that we lose an awful lot of young, well educated people and that the ones being counted are replacements and not necessarily equivalents. Norfolk, Hampton and Virginia Beach fare well in this analysis, because of the 20-29 age group is the primary enlisted military population, and these are the places they settle most in our region. They may pick up education along the way while they are in the service. But most come with little more than high school diplomas. Norfolk is also home to a college and two large universities with large nontraditional (i.e. 20-29 and older) student representation. Hampton’s got HU. Take out the influence of the military and we don’t look nearly as good.

  2. DJRippert Avatar
    DJRippert

    I am with Chris Bonney. The use of a ratio of teenagers to 20 somethings strikes me as suspect. It implies that they are dependent variables I believe. Teenagers live somewhere and grow up. If the number of 20 somethings is less than the number of teenagers then the teens must be leaving. If it’s more then 20 somethings must be replacing teenagers faster than they are leaving.

    Sounds logical but …

    Imagine two cities – A and B. They both have populations of 10,000. But A has good schools while B has poor schools. So, parents tend to stay in A once they have school age kids but leave B. Therefore, A has 3,000 teenagers and B has 2,000 teenagers.

    1,000 twenty-something yuppies live in both A and B.

    City A has a ratio of 3:1 while City B has a ratio of 2:1.

    By the logic of this article City B is more of a millennial magnet than City A.

    However, they are both 10,000 person cities with 1,000 20 – somethings.

    This logic depends on a uniform distribution of teenagers from city to city.

    In Arlington County only 19.3% of the households have people under 18 living with them. In Fairfax County 36.3% of households have people under 18 living with them.

    What’s the real problem in Fairfax County – too few millennials or too many teenagers?

  3. James A. Bacon Avatar
    James A. Bacon

    Agreed. this is a very rough index. Clearly, the Hampton Roads area is a special case that reflects the large military population. Very possibly, Cambridge, Mass., is a special case reflecting the exceedingly large college populations. Fargo, N.D., is likely a special case reflecting North Dakota’s oil boom. You can’t take USA Today’s methodology at face value — you have to dig beneath the numbers — but it provides a good place to start.

    As to Don’s point contrasting Arlington and Fairfax, I suspect that’s the reason the USA Today writers restricted their comparison to cities — not cities and counties. They realized that bedroom communities everywhere will have a higher percentage of teens than urban-core jurisdictions.

    1. DJRippert Avatar
      DJRippert

      Your point about cities and counties is valid. Of course, in screw-ball Virginia that gets kind of hard. However, Fairfax County clearly still has a county profile, whether in Virginia or elsewhere.

  4. cpzilliacus Avatar
    cpzilliacus

    James A. Bacon wrote:

    Arlington tops the list (even though it’s a county and not a city), while Alexandria ranked No. 3. No surprise there.

    Arlington and Alexandria are also perfect for people that work in the downtown area of the District of Columbia, want to be a short distance from work (often by Metrorail or other public transportation, though even by private automobile it is a relatively short trip), yet do not want to experience the “excitement” (good and bad) associated with living in D.C.

  5. larryg Avatar
    larryg

    there is a problem these days with many studies.

    in theory, researchers don’t start with some pre-conceived premise. They suspect something might be true – but they actually want to find out rather than just confirm their suspicions.

    when you start with a premise – you believe might be true – you need to take a “trust but verify” approach once you think you’ve confirmed your premise.

    you need to purposely assume your conclusion is false – and set up to prove it false.

    so you do what DJ did … you take the result and go backwards to see if you can actually confirm the reverse.

    In logic this is know as the fallacy that if ALL X’s are Y’s then it must also be true that ALL Y’s are X’s and it’s clearly and demonstrably not true in logic and …it’s not true in many of these premise-based “studies”.

    this actually has a name also:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_(logic)

    ” In logic, the converse of a categorical or implicational statement is the result of reversing its two parts. For the implication P → Q, the converse is Q → P. For the categorical proposition All S is P, the converse is All P is S. In neither case does the converse necessarily follow from the original statement.[1] The categorical converse of a statement is contrasted with the contrapositive and the obverse.

    Let S be a statement of the form P implies Q (P → Q). Then the converse of S is the statement Q implies P (Q → P). In general, the verity of S says nothing about the verity of its converse, unless the antecedent P and the consequent Q are logically equivalent.

    For example, consider the true statement “If I am a human, then I am mortal.” The converse of that statement is “If I am mortal, then I am a human,” which is not necessarily true.” ”

    but now days you see “correlation” studies that make this fundamental mistake – out the WAZOO!

    the last step in a good study is … to do the “If I am mortal, then I must be human” reverse validation step.

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