<p>On PA, I guess it is only natural to expect the academics to favor those schools with the history, but this really makes the PA a lagging indicator of college faculty. What schools are producing the best students TODAY? I’m pretty confident that the Northeastern schools don’t have anything on their competitors from America’s heartland and beyond, but you wouldn’t get this impression from the PA scores or from the USNWR rankings. </p>
<p>I don't think this is any kind of a left-wing conspiracy, but more a lack of familiarity with the quality of the students and the teaching that is going on in the other regions of the country. IMO, the South and particularly the West are making the bigger business news in America today and much of this is the result of work by graduates of schools in these regions. Silicon Valley is the prime example, but much innovative work in multiple industries is taking place up and down the West Coast and in Texas, parts of the Southeast (Research Triangle, Atlanta, Nashville) and in the greater Washington DC area. Whether that increased business activity and prominence ever translates into greater acceptance of the local schools by academics remains to be seen. </p>
<p>Still, the fact remains that the non-Northeastern areas are experiencing the greatest population gains and this will have ramifications for all Americans in myriad ways. Specific evidence of this shifting is seen in the following listing of the top 20 metropolitan areas in the United States and their relative population growth between 1990 and 2000. I have also listed the schools in or near those metro areas (or most associated with those cities). Granted, a lot of the students from these schools move to environments different than their local colleges, but the colleges themselves can often provide the best local/regional connections, eg, an Emory grad will likely have an advantage in Atlanta over the Cornell or Dartmouth grad. </p>
<p>Fastest Growing Metro Areas 1990-2000 and Area Schools</p>
<p>1 Phoenix, 45.3%<br>
2 Raleigh-Durham, 38.9%, Duke
3 Atlanta, 38.9%, Emory
4 Dallas, 29.3%<br>
5 Houston, 25.2%, Rice
6 Nashville, 25.0%, Vanderbilt
7 Miami, 21.4%<br>
8 Seattle, 19.7%<br>
9 Minneapolis, 16.9%<br>
10 Tampa, 15.9%<br>
11 Wash/Baltimore, 13.1%, Johns Hopkins
12 LA, 12.7%, Caltech
13 SF, 12.6%, Stanford
14 San Diego, 12.6%<br>
15 Chicago, 11.1%, U Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame (?)
16 New York City, 8.4%, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth (?), Cornell (?)
17 Boston, 6.7%, Harvard, MIT, Brown
18 Detroit, 5.2%<br>
19 Philadelphia, 5.0%, U Penn
20 St. Louis, 4.5%, Wash U</p>