A research report by G. Scott Thomas for the Business Journals Digital, an arm of the DBJ’s parent company, places Dallas-Fort Worth as 115th amid metropolitan areas with the percentage of 18-34 year-olds with a college degree or higher. We have 1,620,281 in that age cohort, and only 336,310 hold degrees.
For the fourth largest metro area in the country, this is not good news. Houston ranks even worse, and Texas as a whole looks abysmal. My first response was to assign the results to our influx of younger, uneducated immigrants. But Austin ranks 20th in the nation. (College Station, by comparison, ranks 165th, making it one of the worst among college towns in the country.)
The oil and gas industry has made Texas look very good economically in the current recession, but the future is in the numbers, and the numbers don’t look so good.
25 comments
I think there is actually too much emphasis on college degrees…a college degree does not guarantee a great career or work ethic…you show me a company that makes college degrees mandatory and has no HR issues…there are none.
Unless parents are paying, you are starting your adult life in debt due to loans and there is nothing worng with telling kids that it is OK to be a mechanic/AC repairman etc, etc if that is where life takes them and last time I looked, I think the electrician I just had my house is making more money than what I am, given the price of the invoice.
Its important to instill work ethic in people, not drum it in there head that they must go to college…I think many children/teenagers actually feel defeated by “you must go to college” mentality…not everyone is made out for “college” nor should they be…if everyone had a college degree it would make for a very boring world and at the end of the day the only people that would win would be the universites.
Look at the bottom 10 on the list, 9.5 of 10 in TX
I’m an idiot, the link only shows cities in TX.
Sally,
In Ed Glaeser’s recent book, he acknowledges as much (and that any statistic is an abstraction), but education level also tracks incredibly well with long-term success and viability of cities. Of course, there is another side to the argument, which is what is higher education really training anymore? How to shotgun beers for the most part at an undergraduate level.
Considering what a horrible bubble higher education is in right now, this is probably good news. Right now, getting a four year degree full time means putting on tons of debt for a degree that has almost no chance of landing you a job that can pay that debt off.
A four year degree is indentured servitude right now.
Dallas, like the Texas and the rest of the Sun Belt, has become the land of haves and have-nots. This is your 21st century America.
how many 18 year olds do you know with a college degree?
really.
and what’s a college degree get you today except years in debt trying to pay off that college loan. I was in my 40s before that debt ever got retired.
Sally, I tend to agree with you when the discussion is limited to children from upper-income families. However, the data show that for the general public, a college degree produces twice the lifetime income as a high school degree.
Education is not one size fits all. As in most things in life we have our own roads to walk down. Having said that…it seems the biggest problem(IMO) in Texas is poverty. Poverty seems to beget more poverty(not always just usually) and we have plenty of it here. Fix this and we may see greater education numbers. But then who would flip my burgers and mow my yard?
Dallas did not become an economic powerhouse over the last 60 years because of dudes mowing lawns. Although immigrant rights advocates would have you believe that. No, when you allow a couple hundred thousand people to self-import into your town the whole place dumbs down to a room temperature IQ. We are told that we need to embrace this. Ignore the results. The overcrowded schools, people who use the Emergency Room as a private clinic, gaming the food stamp system and all the other free gimmiedats that Dallas readily hands out.
We now have a culture that embraces teen pregnancy, almost demands it. One that embraces teenage crime and arrest as a right of passage.
The “poverty” metric is one based only on paper. People now game the system at a tremendous rate to pass the “asset test” when applying for federal/state/local aid. They skirt the system by not having bank accounts and using check cashing places to conduct their money transactions.
This isn’t surprising. Dallas as a city, and Texas in general has become a state hostile to education and dissent. Two things college graduates can’t do without.
My point is not so much about, not having a degree…but instilling in our children having a “degree” is not necessarily a measure of success…having work ethic is most important, if you are happy working in a fast food restaurant or learning a trade then so be it….just do it well….and that things are not free, you should pay for everything you have and how you choose to do it, is upto you….Do what you do and doing it with pride is what matters….Just stop teaching them, you need to go to college to get a good job….not necesarily…you can work at McDonalds and go through the management training program and have a great career and becoming a district manager one day…or you can decide to go and get certificaion (AC/electrician, mechanic etc, etc) and make a good living…and yes if you want to be a doctor, it is Undergrad and post grad same as lawyer etc, etc…Its really just about instilling good work ethic in them, not just “degree”….There are many careers out there, that are good careers and they dont need a degree…are you going to be a millionaire? Most likely not, but not many people with undergrad careers are millionaires either…but it does not mean that there is pride to have with other jobs that dont have a degree (and you wont have the debt to go along with it either)
“the data show that for the general public, a college degree produces twice the lifetime income as a high school degree.”
I wonder how dated that information is. I know that same pitch has been used in higher ed for at least the past two decades.
You will never be professionally successful because of a college degree, but not having one will probably preclude from doing so unless you are an entrepreneur.
@ Brent D. Here’s a story from yesterday’s NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/sunday-review/26leonhardt.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=college%20degree&st=cse
The disparity has increased.
If you backed out the 40,000 undergrads in College Station from the population, wouldn’t you get a pretty high percentage? Wouldn’t it make sense to do so?
I see no empirical evidence that DC is the center of learned thought.
@Sally. The “having a degree”, “educated” argument is not about making more money, or being better than “those non-educated” folks. Its about having more opportunities available to a person, having a baseline(foundation) of skills to start a career. Having a degree doesn’t entitle anyone to anything. Its not going to entitle you to wealth. The number of place values your check occupies does not define wealth either. How you manage that paycheck once its in your hands defines whether or not your up to your ears in debt or you build yourself a healthy personal balance sheet. Just like managing your career(work ethic, building network, etc, etc)in addition to having a degree defines your success. And each individual defines what success is for them. In my humble opinion, parents should foot the bill for a least half of their child’s offspring(if not all) to help alleviate the financial burden for graduates.
Sally, if your child were to tell you as a 8th grader or freshman in H.S. “Hey Mom, I’m just going to get by in H.S. and then get a job at for the rest of my life then you would be happy with that? I agree with with Wick and his responses on this.
Honestly…if that is what they want to do as at that time they are not too sure about college…sure why not…at some point they can go to college, you can always go to college later, but if they dont know and they want to be a flight attendant for a couple of years, why not….Many countries have what is called “gap” years between High School and a university education…some people go back to school, some people dont and find out what they like during the “gap” year..
Kids who just really aren’t into academics, should have another option through our various school systems to learn a useful, highly skilled trade. I’d rather be an airline mechanic, or an electrician, than a school teacher any day. Australia is a good example of this sort of program. The kids can actually get a good job right out of high school, if they aren’t college “material.” No one would argue that it’s not good to get a degree, but college just isn’t for everyone.
Come on, Wick. You can do better than that link.
It is real easy to lump “college degree” into a single grouping. We have all dealt with people with college degrees who have a hard time answering a phone. There are the pwople who to to college just to drnik and party. Additionally, we run across people flipping burgers or mowing our yards that would be happy and successful with whatever the opportunity provided them. In the world of generalism, outliers can always be found and these outliers get the attention
In general, the person going to college is trying to better themselves and establish themselves as successful. This is not work effort. This is desire and a large part of what makes the individual is what they see themself as and generally, this is critical to who you are- the self-deluded excluded.
Generally, those who do not attempt college (or even high school) do not set themselves above the crowd. But for every ten they do not, there is the one who has the desire to set themselves apart and luckily in America, desire with hard work can really pay off.
College helps but those in college have already to made a decision to try an succeed – it is not that college prepares them, it is that these people tend to want to succeed
Impassioned arguments AGAINST higher education? Of course, because after all…this is Texas.
Sally, think about flipping those expectations. Expect the kid to go at least one year to college…and THEN decide if it is/isn’t for them.
I have 2 friends whose parents did just that. Good for them. Oh incidentally…30 years later, both make less than $28,000/year and are desperately unhappy in our materialistic culture. One of them accepts her fate. The other howls “Why didn’t my parents MAKE me go? WHY??” Sad.
Each new statistical study reaffirms the value of a college degree, even “soft” ones. I guess all of this unfounded talk of how “worthless” they are makes sense coming from a local culture enthralled with disparaging the educated. Once we become unattractive to the business world, where more education, not less, is becoming the norm, how will we lure anyone in? Low taxes? The weather?
College degrees are important, no one is saying they aren’t, but Texas has economic advantages that other states don’t have that has driven our growth (low taxes, a consistent regulatory environment, bountiful natural resources, etc…)
However, it may be better to look at the root cause of why a lot of people aren’t able to go to college, the cost. There is more student loan debt in the US than credit card debt, which is a staggering figure to think about.
If we want more college degrees in Texas, we have to make Higher Education more affordable for everyone.
Some is good, so more is always better? 100% college degree attainment by a population is not efficient neither would 0%.
Perhaps rushing to judgement about having a smaller percentage of college degrees could overlook some pros/cons that we do not realize.
A less homigenious and growing population may exist here because of greater opportunities for those choosing work that does not require higher education. Logic would suggust that because of currently relative lower cost to living and greater relative population growth, DFW can at least attract people of varies education levels.