Are you living in one of the most educated metro areas?
Despite ranking 2nd and 6th, metro regions have large education gaps by race
If Silicon Valley has an aesthetic, it could be college chic: hoodies, dorms and campuses, not suits, apartments and office parks.
The college fascination makes sense considering the San Jose metropolitan area, which includes Santa Clara and San Benito counties, is the second most educated metropolitan area in the country. That’s according to an analysis of college degree rates, quality of public schools, race and gender education gaps, and more from personal finance website WalletHub.
The San Francisco metro area — which includes Marin, San Mateo, Contra Costa and Alameda counties — is the sixth most educated. Like the Bay Area, the other regions that ranked in the top 10, including first-place Ann Arbor, Michigan, are home to large, well-known universities.
WalletHub’s analysis found that despite its overall high ranking, the San Francisco area ranked 135th out of 137 cities nationally for the education gap between white and black degree holders, relative to their share of the population. The San Jose metro area, in comparison, came in 19th place on that measure.
“The fact that the San Francisco metro area has such a large racial education gap, means that while the opportunity to get a
higher education exists, a large share of the black community is unable to access it,” WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez said in an email.
Silicon Valley’s highly educated workforce is what keeps technology companies in the area despite high housing costs and nightmarish traffic, said Brian Brennan, senior vice president of investor relations at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
“Talent is the mother’s milk of the innovation economy,” Brennan said. “Silicon Valley would not be what it is without the workforce that we have.”
Brennan credited that talent in part to the concentration of universities in the region, including Stanford University, San Jose State and Santa Clara University, plus the University of California, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. Many of them have increased the number of students they graduate in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — in recent years, Brennan said.
But many degree holders in Silicon Valley come from abroad.
“Immigration is more important here than any other place in the country when you look at the key technology hubs in the U.S.,” he said. According to Brennan, 60% of STEM workers in Silicon Valley were born outside the country. In New York, the next closest region, 46% are foreign-born.
Having such a highly educated workforce can be a problem if people working in less skilled or entry-level jobs are being priced out of the region.
Brennan said he worries about the hollowing out of the middle class, with many of the middleskilled jobs that may not require a bachelor’s degree being created in or transferred to lower-cost cities like Austin, Texas, and Boise Idaho.
And for those jobs that can’t be relocated, workers are having to live farther and farther away in search of cheaper housing.
“There are costs when we force people to live an hour and a half or two hours away from where they work,” Brennan said.