Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc
Texas historically been a destination for transplants. Most people I know here in Houston who are college educated are not from Houston or Texas but other states and countries where they already received most if not all their higher education. It's their kids who are likely to attend TX based universities and the schools are expanding. The undergrad and grad schools I went to here quadrupled in student size since my time there. California has not been a major destination for transplants on the scale of the rest of the sunbelt in decades. They long since addressed their higher education needs.
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Managed to find some stats for total college grads by metro area:
LA: 3.5 million
Dallas: 1.77 million
Houston: 1.55 million
That that isn't counting the additional 1.01 million additional graduates in the Inland Empire and Ventura County, many of whom commute into LA, but since I don't know enough about the Texan cities to determine if they also have far outlaying suburbs that should be included I'll leave that out.
In any case your anecdotal experience is correct. LA only has 2-3x the college graduate population of either Dallas or Houston, which tracks fairly close to the ratio of LA's size compared to each city. Dallas and LA have nearly identical degree attainment rates (39.8% vs 39.7%), with Houston falling slightly behind (37.8%). The only reasonable explanation for where these additional skilled workers are coming from is outside the metro.
Which, if we could finally bring this thread back to its original topic, is the central issue with the future of most major non-Cali metros in the sunbelt. Demographically and thus economically, their growth is extremely dependent on domestic migration. And that has historically been tied to their low cost of living, which itself is largely due to the low cost of land. But even in Texas land isn't an infinite resource. Or at least land within an acceptable commuting distance of the major job centers is limited. So the question becomes what does Texas and Florida's future look like after cheap new suburban residential development isn't feasible anymore in their current largest cities? Can Dallas, Houston, and Miami transition creating growth from within rather than taking growth from without? Or will we just build another set of western cities into metropolises?