Brain drain and brain gain: Educational segregation in the United States

The post-industrialization of the American economy, combined with the expansion of American higher education, has created a new form of residential segregation. This dissertation demonstrates that the United States became increasingly segregated by educational attainment during the second half of the Twentieth Century, even as racial and economic segregation declined. In this period, college graduates became increasingly clustered in a handful of communities; and within these human capital hubs, the highly educated became less likely to live in the same neighborhoods as the less highly educated.; Today, more than half of America's college graduates live in just 10% of its counties. At the other end of the educational spectrum, college graduates are underrepresented relative to the national average in more than 85% of American counties. My analyses demonstrate that selective patterns of internal migration are driving the educational polarization of the American landscape. A combination of economic incentives and natural and cultural amenities lure large numbers of college graduates into communities where the concentration of college graduates is already pronounced.; The consequences of educational segregation are wide-ranging. The spatial concentration of college graduates stimulates innovation and local economic growth, creating new economic inequalities between places. In many of the nation's nonmetropolitan areas, the outmigration of highly educated youths is leading to an overall population decline. Human capital concentration has spill-over effects for children's education, bringing educational opportunities to children who grow up in human capital hubs (regardless of their own parents' educations), and limiting opportunities to children raised in brain drain areas. Finally, I demonstrate that educational segregation is a major factor behind the geographic polarization of American political culture. As educational segregation levels have risen, the county-level concentration of college graduates has become an increasingly salient predictor of voting patterns. The result is the distinct red and blue map of the 2004 presidential election: George W. Bush and John F. Kerry split the college graduate vote evenly in 2004, but Kerry won healthy majorities in human capital hubs and Bush's electoral base centered in brain drain counties.