College-Educated Population Growth Outpacing General Population Growth in DC

• December 9th 2010

by UrbanTurf Staff

Aaron Renn, a Chicago-based urban-affairs analyst who writes the blog The Urbanophile, recently wrote a post that examined the migration patterns of college graduates across the country between 2000 and 2009. Unsurprisingly, a large percentage of grads have flocked to New York City’s five boroughs, but the DC region is also represented as a place that young people like to come after university.

While this is by no means earth-shattering news, the interesting findings in Renn’s analysis as it relates to DC are those regarding the percentage of total population growth (in U.S. cities) accounted for by people with college degrees.

In the graph above, any number higher than 100 percent indicates that there was a larger gain in the number of college professionals in a city than in the overall population of the city itself. DC (with about a 175 percent gain in college professionals during the nine-year span) ranks second between New York City and San Francisco. (Arlington ranks seventh and Alexandria ranks ninth.)

The statistics are evidence that certain cities are becoming increasingly exclusive places to live. From the Urbanophile:

“This points out one of the negatives often highlighted about these cities, namely that they are getting more exclusive as increasingly you need to be in the educated elite to be able to live there (or at least to make it worth living there). This might be good for those cities at some level, but I’m not sure it’s entirely good for America.”

For his analysis, Renn used mid-year Census statistics for population figures and to determine the number of residents in certain cities with bachelor degrees or higher. As you can see from his last comment on the post, things don’t change a lot when looking at cities with residents who have graduate degrees.

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This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/college_educated_population_growth_outpacing_general_population_growth/2752.