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BRA, UMass explain: Brain drain no bane, growth in young people shows a gain

Yeah, so what if tons of college graduates flee Boston as soon as they toss those mortarboards in the air? The BRA and UMass Boston's Donahue Institute says it doesn't matter because a) So many of Boston's college kids come from somewhere else, so you'd expect a lot of them to leave and b) Boston has the largest percentage of 20-34 year olds of any major American city, and that's far more important a statistic because it shows we've got a young, dynamic workforce.

Oh, and while we're at it, our escalating housing prices are not driving out the young'uns, either, they say:

We argue that the number and share of younger, skilled workers, regardless of where they attended school, is the most important measure of a vibrant economy and that Boston clearly performs very strongly on this metric. In the last decade, Boston’s population has grown both younger and more college-educated. For example, 40% of Boston’s population hold a college degree, compared to 28% for the U.S. overall. Additionally, more than 50% of the 20-34 year olds in the region hold a college degree and more than half of Boston residents with a college degree are between the ages of 20 and 34. These are hardly signs of a mass exodus of well-educated young adults pushed out from the region due to the lack of economic opportunities, affordable housing, and public amenities.

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They're saying 40% of the City of Boston's population has a college degree? That strikes me as high.

Are they counting college students in this data? I'd argue that while college students are a vital part of the local economy, a 20-23 year-old undergrad is something a bit different than a traditional resident and shouldn't be counted as the same.

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So you're saying that counting undergraduates as residents might skew upward the measured proportion of Boston residents who have college degrees?

And that would be because college undergraduates already have college degrees at a higher rate than does the general population?

Things must have changed since I was in school. I'll tell you, back in the day we went to college when we didn't have a degree, and when we finished, we got one.

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Graduates vs. grad students (which have a degree already) vs. undergrads (no degree)

Which data set did they use?

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I was wondering about the 40% figure for Boston residents

Separately, I was also wondering about the statement that 'Boston has the largest percentage of 20-34 year olds of any major American city'. It seems less meaningful if they are counting the tens of thousands of undergrads in the city as part of the data.

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Moreover, the universe in this is residents 25+.

According to the 2013 American Community Survey, 24.9% of the population of Boston (aged 25 and older) has a Bachelors, while an additional 20.3% have a graduate or professional degree to boot. For the Boston-Cambridge-Newton MA-NH Metro Area the numbers are 25% and 19.8%. So, we in the City are marginally better educated than the area overall.

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So you are saying that 24.9 of Bostonians have ONLY a bachelors, while there is an another 20.3% that has a bachelors plus a graduate degree?

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Sorry, I tried to make it clear, but still in my head it was murky.

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I call BS on this. Every person I know over 30 moved out of the city to the closest cheapest place as soon as having roommates got old. They keep working here but no longer live in the city because of the cost of housing and anticipating having kids which they sure as hell don't want held hostage in a BPS lottery.

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and I didn't even go to college here.

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Just like all those polls people did of their friends back in 2004 that said Kerry was going to defeat Bush in a landslide, which was only matched by the polls that said that Obama was going down in 2012.

Sorry that your crew all moved out, but they probably took their bachelors' degrees to the burbs when the MBAs and JDs needed a place to live.

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all of the JDs and MBAs I know also took their degrees to the burbs as soon as they had kids (some because they didn't want to play the lottery, most because an "affordable" one or two bedroom condo was not big enough once children arrived). As for the neighborhoods of southern Boston, the comment was always something like "if I'm going to be relegated to the suburbs, I'm going to deal only with the crap of the suburbs - I'm not dealing with the crap of the city and the suburbs." I have some thoughts, but truthfully, I'm not entirely sure what they meant.

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Not to generalize, but a lot of the "newcomers" to Roslindale tend to have a lot of degrees (we have 3 bachelors, one certificate, and 2 masters amongst the 2 of us in our sample of Waquiot Manor) while they people who either died off or moved to the greater Walpole area tended to be high school grads. It's an age thing.

True enough, those with the fancy initials, once they have kids aged 3, to have to face the dilemma of private school, BPS, charter school, or the burbs. Working backwards, though, they are living in Boston, and working forwards, Boston is still left with a slightly higher (perhaps within the margin of error) number of residents with graduate degrees.

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Because plenty of people I know, who did not go to college in Boston, or grow up in Boston, moved to Boston once it was time to have a professional career in their late twenties / early thirties. And BPS be damned, they stayed, through kids and all.

Maybe we know a different kind of people.

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They all cut their mortgages more than fifteen years ago, and are pushing 50.

I know a lot of people who were told up front that they were all going to move out of Medford once their kids hit school age, including me. We are all still here, rapidly sending our kids off to college, probably for similar reasons.

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IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/jUh3eGw.gif)

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Me and my family and most of my friends have chosen to stay in the city. Some have moved to neighboring towns but most have stayed. Once you buy a place and decide what you are going to do about schools there's really no reason to go.

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The skyrocketing enrollment numbers at the Elliot School in the North End, the school's rapid expansion into 2 additional buildings, and the continued need to add more seats in the downtown neighborhoods all seem to say otherwise, at least for that part of the city.

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Now, if they used the standard 18-25 and 25-34 ... um, yeah.

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Boston is a great city but the cost of living seems to be rapidly approaching a point where you are better off spending your money elsewhere.

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Any apartment where one doesn't need a bulletproof vest and/or hazmat suit 24/7 is at least $250k, or $1500+ a month.

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The lead paint is dense enough to stop lead bullets!

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$1500? Maybe ten years ago. Up it by a third and you're in the neighborhood (where you can walk ten minutes to catch a bus to change twice and then ride the subway to work).

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Ten years ago I lived in a brownstone on Newbury St for $1500 a month. That was expensive then.

Probably still would have kept the place if the building owner didn't die and have trust fund kids buy and gut the place for short term housing for $3200/m.

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You can still find run-down, unrenovated one bedrooms in Brighton, JP, Rolsindale and better parts of Dot for around $1,500, but that figure has been creeping up quite a bit lately, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hits the $2,000 mark in the not so distant future. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is half the takehome pay of a $75,000 salary, which is quite a bit more than starting pay in most fields. Heck, for many that's a solid mid-career salary. That's why so many recent grads are not sticking around - they missed out on lower housing prices from the last time the bubble burst, and they sure as hell can't afford current rents or mortgages.

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good degree=good money (assuming your degree is in something where money can be made.)

This means, that which some of us would find too much to pay becomes affordable. I mean, people are buying those condos downtown.

Of course, or the rest of us, the budget conscious class, things are not getting better.

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I think its funny people think those $500k luxury apartments are going to MBA's, chemists, and doctors right out of school with 300K debt and not rich boomers, REIT's, or foreign investors. Even if they did, the city / state is not going to prosper forever just catering to the 1% as it pushes the the lower classes it relies on doing the actual work further and further away.

Count me in the group where when it came time to raise families, 90% of my friends moved out of state where their buck went a heck of a lot further to raising a family without the need to commute 90 minutes one way.

The boomers will die eventually, the rich will move on to the next hot market, and foreign investors will dry up. The bubble will pop and we will probably be unprepared for it.

And will people with roots now planted elsewhere move back? I doubt it, especially if Boston is on a downturn.

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at least, there are more than enough people to backfill

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All of my close friends from back in the day from Boston (mostly Dorchester) no longer live in Boston. To be fair, almost all of them are out of state, in places where there is an industry home to the area (for instance, one lives in DC, and by that I mean a 5 minute walk from Maryland), while the guy who moved to the burbs worked in the burbs for over a decade before opting for the lawn and shorter commute.

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Hmm, I dunno. I live in JP and there sure do seem to be a lot of 30-somethings here with kids. There are really two metrics here that a lot of people don't seem to count correctly: The first is that the Boston Public Schools, when measured against student improvement, rather than raw SAT scores, are really no worse than their middle class counterparts, and the second is that, price wise, it probably makes more sense to stay in the city and pay for private school than to take on all of the additional costs of living in a suburb with "good" schools.

Also, I live in a 990 square foot condo in JP that I bought in 2011 for ~$300k. It is possible to have enough space to raise a child (my downstairs neighbors have two) and still live in the city for a reasonable sum, just not within 500 feet of the Greenway.

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cost of living seems to be rapidly approaching a point where you are better off spending your money elsewhere.

That's the trend though with cities. If you're earning stagnant wages - then you're going for cheaper pastures, though I don't think "cheap" is a certainty when you factor in the costs of living without, say, public transportation. Maybe places like SF, NYC, and Boston will price themselves out of relevance, but we aren't anywhere close to that point. Successful municipal economies are complex, sure, but they rely significantly on thick labor markets, where there are lots of prospective hirers and employees. Boston has that. Maybe you'll get a bigger house down in Rhodie or Georgia, in a safer town, with better schools, but you'll have drastically less choice in terms of jobs. Works if you're older, but not so much when you're young. Young kids are coming to Boston, and will continue to come because the city offers a much, much greater variety of potential employers than elsewhere and pay accordingly.

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I know lots of people who went to college out there, loved living in Northampton and couldn't find anything like the kind of high paying professional job out there that you can get in greater Boston. Yet house prices aren't even that much lower there than the Parkway.

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It depends on what sector of the economy you serve. In some cases income follows cost of living and living in a city with a more diversified economy makes sense. In others, you can actually get paid more in other parts of the country. For 500k you can get a condo in southie or JP OR you could live in portland oregon in a nice big house with a yard AND have a vacation place in the mountains or near the shore....hmm

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They just did a study with Mass Inc that says we'll have fewer college graduates by 2030, at least statewide, modest gains for Boston, quite a change from recent decades.

http://www.massinc.org/Research/At-the-Apex-The-2030-Educational-Attainm...

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How are these contradictions?

The BRA Donahue study says that the Greater Boston the region produces 150,000 college degrees a year, but only creates roughly 70K job openings annually, with only a portion of those jobs requiring a college degree. The point of the BRA Donahue study was to say, "how many college graduates can you actually reasonably retain?" given job and housing production. If you want to "keep" more graduates from local institutions, they need a job and they need a house.

The MassINC study projects educational attainment out to 2030. It concludes that due to slow population growth and the aging of the baby boomers, Massachusetts will likely have less college educated residents between the ages of 25-64 in 2030 than it had in 2020.

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