Slashdot Mirror
Geographic Segregation By Education
The wage gap between college-educated workers and those with just a high school diploma has been growing — and accelerating. But the education gap is also doing something unexpected: clustering workers with more education in cities with similar people. "This effectively means that college graduates in America aren't simply gaining access to higher wages. They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air." Most people are aware of the gentrification strife occurring in San Francisco, but it's one among many cities experiencing this. "[Research] also found that as cities increased their share of college graduates between 1980 and 2000, they also increased their bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, museums and art galleries per capita. And they experienced larger decreases in pollution and property crime, suggesting that cities that attract college grads benefit from both the kind of amenities that consumers pay for and those that are more intangible." The research shows a clear trend of the desirable cities becoming even more desirable, to the point where it's almost a necessity for city planners to lure college graduates or face decline.
"We want to be as wealthy and well-positioned as people who worked their asses off in their 20's even though we couldn't be bothered to educate ourselves after high school and spent our 20's living with our parents, partying, and having a sweet car that we could only afford because we lived with our parents."
Here's a thought: Teach your kids the concept of long-term goals... It worked wonders for me.
Who did what now?
My observation is that people who don't go to college tend to get a job locally. People who do go to college often attend a college outside of the local area, and when they graduate, often apply for jobs nationwide.
The process of going to college makes moving to a new location much more natural.
It's no wonder that college grads will move to places where they can get good jobs, and that this would be places that already have a high concentration of people with college degrees.
... the college education included acquiring the desire to move to such places?
Personally, I don't consider places like NYC or SF to be desirable places to live. "Clean air"? "Low crime?" "Better schools?" Certainly, compared to other "cities of size". But, to me, the choice isn't limited to which "big city" to live in. And those criteria work to exclude larger cities, in my opinion.
If that's your cup of tea, and you've the good fortune to select a profession that pays the bills your entire life in your chosen metropolis, I say more power to you. Others may find solace in living more simple, rural lives.
Remember, much of the benefit of higher wages is just more money passing through your hands to accommodate the cities' higher cost of living.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
less crime? OK. clearner air? compared to....? NYC is a big place - its not just Manhattan or the upper East (or West) side. In fact, you might make the argument in reverse when it comes to NYC, that lower "skilled" workers are clustering there and getting the benefits described.
For true equality we need collectivization, or genocide, whichever comes first.
There's more restaurants because there are more high-income college grads to spend money there. There's less street crime because Johnny the Finance Douchebag isn't likely to do anything worse than public urination. (white collar crime is another matter)
As for better schools, hasn't happened yet at least in NYC -- the system is very uneven and the lengths parents will go through to get their kid in a better elementary school are legendary. Lose the battle, and welcome to the suburbs. If it does happen, it'll again be because the well-educated wealthy college students are there.
Cleaner air is mostly because there's little polluting industry left. Which means fewer blue-collar jobs.
The implied narrative that those rich overeducated scum are hogging all the good places and leaving the poor in high-crime areas with bad schools, dirty air, and no amenities gets cause and effect completely wrong.
Ah, yes. That. I live in Portugal and I see that attitude show every now and then in the people. You do not want that to happen in your region. It's bad.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Yes, lots of educated (and wealthy) citizens create markets for better services in cities. But decades of surveys of companies planning locations and of educated workers considering relocation tell us it works the other way around, too.
States like Arizona and Texas that base their plans for attracting high-wage (lots of educated employees) employers on cutting taxes usually do it by also slicing schools and other services.
That seems to be working in places like Austin, where the city makes up for the lack of State support for education (or actual hostility to it) by cranking up local sales taxes -- which fall more on the poor than on the affluent. Which is a sweet deal if you're making serious money as a twenty-something in technology there, but might not look so good when you have kids and you're looking for daycare and primary schools.
We're doing the experiment. Check in again in ten or twenty years to see which way the arrow of cauality runs.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Look at all these jobs we've created! means, more and more, subsistence level service industry jobs that will afford the children of these citizens a measurable disadvantage over the offspring of parents with professions.
When measuring ability versus resources, remember that no one scores without the ball.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The self-taught "experts" may not be complete dumbfucks, but they never have as complete of a body of knowledge as somebody who has actually even just tried to get some sort of a formal education in their chosen field.
I'm talking about the guy who maybe never even finished high school, but he read a couple of Ruby on Rails books, hacked together a simple blog system that kinda worked, and now he considers himself a computer science expert.
I've worked with enough of these self-proclaimed self-taught "experts" to have noticed some trends. One of the most singificant is that they have massive holes in what they know. They may know the basics of using a given programming language, but then they'll have no idea about security, or algorithms, or writing code that performs well. They won't know about Big-O notation and its implications. They don't know anything about relational theory and have no idea about the ACID principles, so they use NoSQL DBs, write what would be simple SQL queries using complex JavaScript code instead, and create "databases" that corrupt or lose data left and right.
The guy with the bachelor's degree may not be an expert, but at least he'll have likely heard at least something beyond the basics. He at least knows that an O(n^4) algorithm isn't going to scale well. He at least knows how to use foreign key constraints when designing a DB.
Hell, even the guy who only managed a couple of years of college before dropping out is probably a better candidate than the self-taught "expert" with no college experience whatsoever.
As an industry, we don't need yet another high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book thinking he's anything more than a shitty high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book. We need less such people, in fact.
What the summary fails to point out, of course, is that the growth of all the extra facilities - bars, restaurants, dry cleaners etc. - also ensure the job market grows in non-graduate jobs too, so it's win-win for everyone that lives in the lucky city
Prices in cities are targeted at those high-earning college graduates. There may be greater need for bartenders, waitstaff, etc, but those low-wage workers can't afford to actually live in the city themselves, which necessitates long commutes, which eats up even more of their meager pay, which ensures that the lower class stays lower class.
The self-taught "experts" may not be complete dumbfucks, but they never have as complete of a body of knowledge as somebody who has actually even just tried to get some sort of a formal education in their chosen field.
Most college graduates are money-seeking who don't understand anything, too.
I'm talking about the guy who maybe never even finished high school, but he read a couple of Ruby on Rails books, hacked together a simple blog system that kinda worked, and now he considers himself a computer science expert.
So in other words, you're comparing completely ignorant idiots to people who got some amount of formal education. Not a big surprise there. On the other hand, people who do self-education right...
I hope you're not using these people to deride all autodidacts. The self-taught "experts" you speak of are barely self-taught at all, so the comparison isn't really valid.
As an industry, we don't need yet another high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book thinking he's anything more than a shitty high school reject who read a shitty Ruby on Rails book. We need less such people, in fact.
As an industry, we also don't need more shitty college graduates who have no idea what they're doing (the majority). And no, not even they understand things like Big-O notation and its implications, because pretty much all they cared about was getting a degree, and the colleges were happy to take their money.
If I seem hostile, it's only because I've seen people lump in idiots who barely even tried to self-educate with people who worked hard to educate themselves. In my mind, I separate college students who go there almost solely to get a degree (in other words, brainwashed losers) and college students who go there to get a better understanding of the universe around them. Why can't others do the same?
Except that immigrants to the US are a self-selecting group. Only the most motivated people are going to go through all the hassle and work that it takes to actually get here, so of course they are more likely to be successful once they do. There are also a lot of successful black people that grew up poor. But there are just a lot more black people overall, and as a group they didn't choose to be here in a country that is constantly shitting on them. As to your claim that there is no oppression any more, that is constantly disproved by studies that show having a "black" sounding name will result in fewer job interviews, less support from university faculty, harsher law enforcement treatment, etc. It is a reality that you cannot deny.
I'm not an American, by the way, [...] If that hurts your feelings, bugger off.
I think we've worked out your nationality. Cobber.
Absolutely right. I grew up in an economically disadvantaged area, went to college, and settled in one of the best-performing metro areas in the country. My classmates who skipped college are still there, driving 1-2 hours each way to the closest job they can find, and enduring the double disadvantages of lacking a college degree and living in a depressed area.
When one is living dangerously close to the poverty line, moving away from friends and family will be perceived as unacceptable risky. Only the most ambitious will leave, and most of those people went to college anyway.
I saw a report on I think 60 minutes probably 10 or 15 years ago where the black community was up in arms because they were losing out on scholarships. The complaint was they were losing them to the children of recent immigrants from Africa, a group that hadn't gone through the history of slavery because their ancestors didn't live in the US. (The whole point as far as they were concerned was this was to give a leg up to people that as a class had suffered through slavery and racism and recent African immigrants were not in this group but qualified for the scholarships and took them away from the people they were intended for.) To add insult to injury the recent African immigrants tended to be fairly successful and that lead to the complaint they didn't need the help anyway. But like you wrote, these immigrants were a self selecting group who went through all that hassle and they were more likely to be successful in the end.(It looks to me as though any group that intentional migrates will tend to do well because they're the driven to find success while people that are forced to migrate probably won't.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I really thought this was rather obvious, and that everyone already knew it, whether they discussed it or not.
Yeah I've seen that. And I'm sure that more of that is inevitable if the way our economy works doesn't change. The behavior your describing is the -effect- of relative income inequality (trickle down supply-side economic policy) growing wider over the last 35 years. And it's going to get worse, much worse, and it's going to cost "us" a lot more to ignore than if we actively alter course.
Emotion based outrage, increase in crime rates, riots, and eventually violent revolution are the -predictable- effects of growing relative income inequality and loss of social mobility. And, as in the past, the powerful and elite are digging in their heels -which actually makes the situation worse.
The point is, this is not an issue specific to any generation or culture being more prone to jealousy than another. It's a predictable -response- of every human population in similar circumstances.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I've seen similar things with college-educated "experts." "Experts" will be "experts" no matter what education they received, because they half-ass everything.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The amount of arable land in the world is fixed. Some people live on a thousand acres, some people live in a tenement building.
The amount of currency in the world is effectively fixed even in a fractional reserve system.
Concentrated wealth does not create jobs, distributed wealth does. If there is a demand for shoes (lots of people want and can afford shoes), there WILL be a shoe factory. If people cannot afford to buy new shoes every year then there will NOT be a shoe factory and no amount of tax cuts for the wealthy will cause there to be one.
Money goes where money is, like gravity. If it's not broken up and dispersed from time to time the gears will eventually grind to a halt. --this is why there will always be a death tax btw.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
At least here in Norway this trend probably started even earlier, but we have a significantly larger proportion of dual-income university-educated couples. (This trend is supported by our one-year parents leave with pay, where the parents have to share this time, and by public kindergartens when the children are a little older.)
I suspect that a strong driver for this big city concentration is the fact that most couples meet sometime during their university studies, and when this switched from being men getting their MSc's meeting the girls from the nursing schools, to being men & women at the same university, they would have really strong incentives to try to settle in a city with a big enough employer base that both would have multiple job alternatives.
I.e. my wife & I have lived in Oslo for almost 30 years now, we have always had lots of employment options, while my youngest brother and his wife live in a far smaller town:
In their area it has significantly harder to locate alternate (and interesting) employment when bad times hit the company one of them worked at.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
What I want to know, why are people modding up such an opinionated piece of drivel from an anon coward? This so called debate is old and sad. People choose to learn what they think is important. Most employers seem to think getting the work done FAST and not blowing things up is important. I have worked for employers for 20 years now and taught myself what I needed to know. I also went to school and took calc, chem, physics, have read constantly for my whole life, whatever, it didn't have a damn thing to do with what I work on now or my approach to learning. That started from when I was young, not college. So this talk of making a big distinction between those who go to college/university and those who do not, is "uneducated" and a false start to any conversation.
Funny...as someone doing the hiring and firing for my company and another for the last 20 years....the top developers we've had have by and large been self taught programmers(many with degrees in something unrelated, like business or biology, or none at all). We get way too many guys with MS in CS who can't fucking use source control properly or talk to their fellow man. Sorry, the software development labs that have sprung up in my alma mater and CS departments around the nation to teach software engineering practices vs. just cs knowledge are little more than the zealotry/whims of the professors/ta's running them. And they can't teach what is really needed....self learning and getting things done.
If you are hiring good people they will know when an optimization is needed and when it isn't and design/build accordingly. Maybe you're hiring practices are the problem?
Also, the most stark difference i see between reality out there and your statement is the DB knowledge. Hands down, CS graduates...the higher the GPA..the more shit they are at any type of real DB implementation. Never understood that, but your statement just reminded me of that.
A degree doesn't guarantee diddly - had a colleague, a hardware EE FIVE years out of school, who was unable over the course of a 4 month project to remember the difference between a BJT and a MOSFET, for between the two polarities thereof.
Most frustrating as the circuit in question used all 4 types, and every review had to start from square one or, at best two. FIVE years in industry.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.