Really great stuff from Bill Testa of the Chicago Fed’s blog. If you read the whole article it breaks things down by ethnicity and compares the city and the burbs. This is the kind of great, factual stuff that the major media outlets will never spend the time discussing:
Trends in Education and Income in Chicago
DECEMBER 12, 2017
Harvard economist Edward Glaeser shows that education is one of the strongest predictors of urban economic growth. This is particularly the case for older cities like Chicago. One of the reasons for this is that a higher density of college-educated workers is associated with higher levels of worker productivity.
There is very good news for Chicago. Recent data for 2016 from the United States Census Bureau’s American Community Survey shows that the city of Chicago now has the highest percentage of college graduates of the seven largest cities in the United States (Table 1). Almost 2 out of 5 adults twenty-five and older in Chicago have at least a bachelor’s degree. Chicago beats New York City, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix, and Philadelphia. Of the ten largest cities, only San Diego and San Jose have higher levels of educational attainment as measured by the percentage of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree.
If the sample is limited to non-Hispanic whites, Chicago even beats San Diego and San Jose, the home of Silicon Valley. For this population, over 3 in 5 have a college degree in Chicago. In some community areas in Chicago like Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and the Loop, about 4 out of 5 have a college degree.
One of the reasons for Chicago’s success in this arena is that the city of Chicago is an attractive place to live and work for college graduates, especially young grads. Over half of the young college graduates in the Chicago metropolitan area live in the city of Chicago. This is up from about forty percent in 1990.
Another reason is that migrants to Chicago are more likely to have a college degree. Last year about 3 of 4 migrants to Chicago from other states and from abroad had a college degree. Ten years ago only about 1 in 2 migrants to Chicago had a college degree. It is particularly noteworthy that in 2016 seventy-three percent of foreign migrants to Chicago had a college degree.
If one goes back in time, Census data indicates that adults in the city of Chicago were significantly less educated than their suburban counterparts. This is no longer the case. The percentage with a college degree in Chicago is higher now than in the suburbs of the Chicago metropolitan area although some suburbs have higher levels of attainment (Table 2). For example, 2 out of 3 residents of Evanston have at least a bachelor’s degree.
Although non-Hispanic whites who account for about one-third of the population of Chicago are doing well, the situation for African-Americans and Hispanics is more mixed. Of the ten largest cities in the United States, African-Americans in Chicago rank seventh and Hispanics rank ninth in the percentage of adults with a college education.
Read the rest here:
http://midwest.chicagofedblogs.org/?p=3048