‘Superstar’ cities thrived on college graduates. Now they’re leaving
The college graduates who fill white-collar jobs in the San Francisco area began to leave in growing numbers about a decade ago. More and more have moved to other parts of the country — an accelerating outflow of educated workers that, in a poorer part of America, might be thought of as brain drain.
When the pandemic arrived, these departures surged so sharply that the San Francisco area has lately lost more educated workers than have moved in.
Over this same time, a similar pattern has been taking shape in California’s metro San Jose and in Los Angeles. Across the country, it has been building in the Washington, D.C., and New York City areas. Educated workers, dating to before the pandemic, have been migrating away from the most prosperous parts of the country.
This trend, visible in an Upshot analysis of census microdata, is startling in retrospect. Major coastal metros have been hubs of the kind of educated workers coveted most by high-powered employers and economic development officials. Economists have lamented the growing coastal concentration of their wealth. A politics of resentment in America has fed on it, too. These urban centers have become a class of their own — “superstar cities” — with outsize impact on the American economy fueled by the clustering of workers with degrees.
But it appears in domestic migration data that, years after lower-wage residents have been priced out of expensive coastal metros, higher-paid workers are now turning away from them, too.
Working-age Americans with a degree are still flowing into these regions from other parts of the country, often in large numbers. But as the pool leaving grows faster, that educational advantage is eroding. Boston’s pull with college graduates has weakened. Seattle’s edge vanished during the pandemic. And the analysis shows San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Washington all crossing a significant threshold: More college-educated workers left than moved in.
For most of this century, large metros with 1 million residents or more have received all of the net gains from college-educated workers migrating around the country, at the expense of smaller places. But among those large urban areas, the dozen metros with the highest living costs — nearly all of them coastal — have had a uniquely bifurcated migration pattern: As they saw net gains from college graduates, they lost large numbers of workers without degrees.
At least, that was true until recently. Now, large, expensive metros are shedding both kinds of workers.
The college-educated workers who have turned away from them are increasingly migrating toward major metros that are still prosperous but not quite so expensive — places such as Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston and Tampa, Florida. During the pandemic, smaller cities such as Portland, Maine, and Wilmington, North Carolina, also saw growing inflows of such workers.
The overall migration rate in America today is historically low, and mobility has fallen since the 1980s for all kinds of demographic groups. But these college-educated workers have recently bucked that trend. In the years leading up to the pandemic, their mobility rate was actually rising, a pattern true for both local moves and the kind of longer-distance moves between metro areas analyzed by The Upshot. That has opened a potentially new divide in the American economy between increasingly mobile white-collar workers and blue-collar workers who are increasingly likely to stay put.
For every move that anecdotally points to these trends — and the pandemic produced many such anecdotes — it’s trickier to capture these patterns nationwide. The census doesn’t publicly track moves between metro areas by demographic cohorts. So to identify these patterns, The Upshot examined an anonymized sample of millions of census records and identified people who moved, grouped them by education level and age, and then linked each mover’s origin and destination with larger counties and metro areas.
The fact that big coastal metros have been losing workers without a degree is not that surprising — living costs have surged in these places as the good big-city jobs once available to less-educated workers in factories and clerical pools have dwindled. But for workers with a degree, economists have concluded that the higher pay promised in places such as the San Francisco Bay Area and New York should still mean it’s a good deal to live there.
That makes it all the more curious that these workers have been leaving anyway.
“Migration patterns for lower-education workers make complete sense,” said Daniel Shoag, an economist at Case Western Reserve University who has found similar trends in work with co-authors Stan Veuger and Philip Hoxie.