Miami in Top 10 for College Degree Density

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

I was pleased and to be honest a bit surprised that Miami makes the top ten for College Degree Density:

Human Capital 201CDensity201D | The Big Picture

(Via DeLong, via Barry Ritholtz via Richard Florida)

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6 Responses to Miami in Top 10 for College Degree Density

  1. Just me says:
    June 16, 2010 at 3:35 pm

    I would be more interested to see a per capita measure rather than a degree density by square mile measure. But still cool and surprising.

  2. Cathy says:
    June 16, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    I’d like to see a breakout for men and women.

  3. Donald A. Coffin says:
    June 16, 2010 at 5:01 pm

    My guess is that this is highly correlated with population density generally. For it to be meaningful, there needs to be a significant correlation betweeh population density and college graduation, and why that should happen is not at all clear to me.

  4. michael says:
    June 16, 2010 at 10:53 pm

    There is a correlation with cites ranked by population density, as there would have to be, but I’m not sure it is quite as strong as your intuition suggests.

    Here are the top 20 cities by population density (1990 data):

    1 New York
    2 East Los Angeles CDP
    3 Paterson
    4 San Francisco
    5 Jersey
    6 Chicago
    7 Inglewood
    8 Boston
    9 Philadelphia
    10 Newark
    11 El Monte
    12 Santa Ana
    13 Yonkers
    14 Miami
    15 Washington
    16 Berkeley
    17 Hialeah
    18 Baltimore
    19 Elizabeth
    20 Bridgeport

  5. whizzer_white says:
    June 16, 2010 at 11:03 pm

    well when you have 59 POS schools in the miami area, the uneducated masses just appear to be educated with worthless degrees from FAU, FIU, MDCC, Barry, Nova, Miami, etc.

  6. Vic says:
    June 17, 2010 at 8:04 am

    I’d also wonder if this chart is affected by the fact that is most parts of the country, the places where college grads tend to live and even work in highest density is not in the city proper, but in the surroundings. Dallas for example has a large urban area, but you go next door to Plano, etc. and you will, it seems to me, find a much higher density of college grads.

    The way most of the country works, there is a large central city than is basically given over to the underclass and where business doesn’t have as big a footprint (due to taxes), surrounded by a suburban ring where all the middle class and real business is. Once you have enough money to do so, you buy a house in the suburbs or even country – not the city! Believe it or not, there are many people, including me, who wouldn’t live in NYC if they were GIVEN a free penthouse at Central Park West and a 200K salary for doing nothing. If the chart/study/whatever is solely looking at city boundaries, then I WOULD expect to find certain big cities, mostly on the coasts, to be high on the chart, while others to be inexplicably low.

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