Increase in its college-educated population
Seattle is a liberal city, but has repeatedly won plaudits from the conservative Forbes. It was previously No. 5 on Forbes’ list of America’s “Best cities for good jobs.”
No metropolitan area in the U.S. has a greater concentration of college campuses than Boston. The Boston-Cambridge-Newton area comes out at No. 1 on Forbes’ list: 44 percent of its population consists of college graduates. The metropolitan area has seen a 32.2 percent increase in its college-educated population since 2000.
The onetime “steel city” of Pittsburgh ranks No. 2 in the Forbes survey, due mainly to what Kotkin and Schell describe as “the largest percentage point increase since 2000 in the proportion of its population that is college educated.”
Silicon Valley appears prominently in the Forbes ranking.
The San Jose-Sunnyvale -Santa Clara metropolitan area is No. 3 in the survey. A few miles north — albeit a torturous drive on the Bayshore or Nimitz Freeways — San Francisco-Oakland Hayward comes in at No. 8 in the Forbes ranking.
“You do not want to come to the Bay Area today without a high-paying job requiring a good college degree if you expect to live a middle-class lifestyle,” caution the authors.