<p>Some interesting articles from NYT. See other related articles in links.</p>
<p>How</a> the Location of Colleges Hurts the Economy - NYTimes.com</p>
<p>It’s nice if you’re in one of the areas of high concentration.</p>
<p>The funny thing is the 9th state on the list has experienced a huge brain drain for years. The higher the level of education, the more likely a graduate will leave Indiana.</p>
<p>Of course, it is also a place that requires the chancellors and tech business owners to lobby the state legislature to not pass anti-evolution legislation, so there is a reason :)</p>
<p>This is an absurd analysis because it’s based on numbers of colleges, not numbers of seats at those colleges.</p>
<p>The Northeast, New England in particular, has a high concentration of colleges that are both highly selective and SMALL. </p>
<p>The article says that Texas has roughly four times as many people as Massachusetts — but only half as many selective colleges. But how many students are there at the University of Texas at Austin compared to, say, Amherst and Williams?</p>
<p>I would like to see the data reanalyzed in a way that takes the sizes of the colleges into account. Then we might see a pattern with some meaning.</p>
<p>OF COURSE the Eastern Seaboard has the highest concentration of colleges–it has been inhabited by education-seeking people for longer than any other region of the country. I think the article is dumb, but some of the related points are interesting and might be good for a spirited debate on CC.</p>
<p>First, did anyone look at the Barron’s selectivity ranking? There’s some surprising categorization there.</p>
<p>Second, the finding that students who live near a selective college tend to attend a selective college (although it doesn’t conclude that they attend THAT selective college) seems to say something about the regionalism of higher education in this country. Where there isn’t a high concentration of selective colleges, people choose other options–usually the big state schools. If nothing else, this pattern tends to explain the regional differences toward “elite” schools that sometimes come out on this site.</p>