We write an awful lot about the importance of a college-educated workforce, which accounts for almost 70% of a city’s economic success. Our friend, George Lord, sent us this link to a map that shows the percentage of the population with college degrees and allows for a quick comparison to our peer cities.
In particular, we were reminded of something that makes our community much different from many of our peers. Here, when you move away from the urban county at the core of the MSA, key indicators get worse, such as the low percentage of college-educated workers in our surrounding counties.
To see the map, click here.
Definitely a concerning indicator. We are an atoll surrounded by a sea of undereducated residents. I would really like to see a map that displays the counties that are hemorrhaging those with a bachelor’s degree and the communities that are absorbing that population.
Does U of M track or Rhodes track its alumni? That could be a good start.
I am all for raising the % of students that receive their bachelors but what if we are only placing 10-20% in the local job market? We need these numbers before citing the local economic impact associated with increasing the number college grads by X %.
Aaron-
Excellent point. I cannot help but assume that increasing the number of students that go on to receive a bachelor’s degree will have a positive impact on the local economy. However, the pitfall is that many if not most of these individuals would likely relocate to other cities once completing their education. I can envision a “chicken or the egg” scenario. The greatest benefit to an increased number of individuals earning a bachelor’s degree is the corollary decrease in poverty and its related symptoms and an increase in local entrepreneurial activity. In order to achieve these ends, a certain critical mass must be achieved. In order to achieve the critical mass, we must have a large enough employment base that is able to retain or attract a greater number of those graduating with degrees than leave the city on an annual basis for other destinations. Of course, in order to attract or grow the employers that would hire these individuals, we must first have a stable base of those who have earned their degree.
From my vantage point, that leaves us with two options. We can either attempt to attract or grow the types of businesses that require a highly educated workforce. However, information to date indicates these types of companies are the least likely to be wooed by the types of incentives provided to Electrolux and are instead more attune to quality of life issues. The second option is to simply do whatever we can to increase the educational achievement of the local population and simply hope for the best.
Saw that mapping a long while ago
Memphis suffers from migration from MISSISSIPPI
All you have to do is examine the percentages in neighboring Mississippi counties for a real laugh.
That’s were the problem has been for decades ! mirgation from eastern Arkansas and the dumb Delta of MISSISSIPPI, and as long as Memphis MSA is a magnet to these dumb populations, it’s going to have a low percentage of college grads.
It’s truly laughable to look at the lack of education of Memphis’ neighbors……
No real wonder why Memphis lags behind, eh ?
Shekel: This mapping has only been up since the 23rd, but as usual, you know everything before the rest of us.
This is truly the consequence of being an industrial-minded region where in some lines of work you don’t even need a college education. And yet, when you compare these numbers to the last decade, the number of people with college degrees has grown but has been stagnant in some counties in our region where poverty is still a serious issue.
If we are ever to grow as a region as a whole, it has to start with encouraging people to seek a higher level of learning beyond high school, but even that is a difficult, if not doable, task to achieve by itself. Relying solely on distribution and manufacturing jobs as our bread and butter will not get us too far. It will only leave us further behind.
The entire region around Memphis (West Tenn, Miss, Ark)does suffer from high poverty and low education. That’s not news, it’s been apparent for generations. The dominance of cotton production and the need for labor for that purpose meant that once mechanization made their labor unnecessary, we had a huge population of uneducated unemployed and underemployed people who were a drain and not an asset. So instead of being cotton pickers, in Memphis, they work for 9 bucks an hour in distribution warehouses.
@FRANK
what’s eating on YOU ? if you think that this sort of analysis has not been done PRIOR to it being posted on sites such as this, then you’re living in a dark cave
so WHAT’s WITH just ANOTHER PERSONAL ATTACK ??
what’s with you people ?? lol
James,
I think you are giving the region too much credit. Many of these areas never entered into a period of industrialization. Even manufacturing values a limited degree of critical thinking and logic application that one develops in high school.
I would suggest this result can be derived from the region’s agrarian roots. Agricultural work of the type that dominated the delta and the surrounding region until the mid-20th century valued manual labor and little else. We are not simply discussing counties where only 9% of the population have a bachelor’s degree. These same counties post high school graduation rates that are depressingly low. While 8.42% of Lee County, AR has managed to obtain a bachelor’s degree, only 37.4% of the same county (age 25 and older) managed to graduate from High School. It’s one thing to suggest that we work toward increasing the percentage of the population that has a bachelor’s degree in a place like Shelby County where over 80% of the population has graduated from high school. It’s quite another to discuss the same goal in a region with the stark reality related above.
Exactly, urbanut. The outer regions of this MSA need to learn to crawl first, and that’s where they are, learning to crawl even in 2011.
A higher percentage of college graduates is certainly desirable, but preceding even that is a reorientation of an anti-intellectual culture. An agrarian culture is not the problem. In the farm belt of the Midwest high school graduation rates stand at 90 per cent or above. (As an aside, one ingredient in a culture that is not anti-intellectual is a predominance of religious denominations with a history of an educated clergy.) A culture that prefers the rantings of demagogues with slogans to simplify all issues instead of careful reflection will continue to be mired in poverty. It does little for the economy to complain about the quality of education here when the complainer benefits financially from a work force whose desired qualifications are the ability to read, write, count, and lift seventy pounds. Further, to see education as providing a work force for the available work in the Memphis area is quite different from preparing our children in the fields that interest them even though they may need to go elsewhere for fulfilling careers in those fields. The former view is parochial and a part of the problem. Finally, education when it is working provides for upward social mobility, and that mobility is threatening to the haves.
Yes, I agree it’s not an agrarian culture per se, it’s the plantation/sharecropper agrarian culture around here that was the problem.
Even though it is not directly related I cannot help but remember the image of the individuals standing on the levees during the 1927 Mississippi River flood. Attempts to remove these families were shunned by local community leaders and farm owners and investors who feared that once these residents (labor) left the delta, they would never return.
Perhaps if we can salvage our public primary education system in Memphis through the new initiatives and reform undertaken over the past few years, we will be able to inform similar reform in the delta. Until we find a viable means of educating this population, we are still leaving them stranded on the levee.
urbanut, those attempts to evacuate the black flood victims on the levees weren’t just shunned, they were directly thwarted by the white leaders in 1927. They were aboslutely deathly obsessed with making sure they had a pliable controlled labor force and not letting it emigrate out. They even tried to bring in Italian immigrants to solve their labor shortages, but they italians didn’t have the legal contraints working against them that blacks did, so they moved out of cottonpicking as soon as they had 2 cents to rub together. Once cotton production was fully mechanized, then white leaders started encouraging blacks to leave.
I see you’ve read “Rising Tide”, or something similar. I found the book absolutely eye opening in its description of the social and economic systems, its history and the easily identifiable relationship to issues that are impacting us today.
That one and a few others, Cobb has a great book on the history of the MIssissippi Delta and its economic and social institutions. MOst Southern Place on Earth.
The MISSISSIPPI Delta is exactly WHY Memphis education, society, culture isn’t going anywhere ‘fast enough’, but ‘too fast’ for the status quo closet rednecks.
It’s going to take 25-30 years…er, maybe..lol
Got that kind of time on your hands ? I hope you do
shalom !
Thanks, that’s what we’re saying too.
Great map ! it highlights some of the reasons for Memphis’ perception, and its reality on the ground. It is surrounded by lack of education. It has attracted those people around or outside of the area to the ‘big city’ of Memphis. If our draw is continually from those poorish areas, we won’t progress educationally- well, not very fast at least !