WaPo | Census data suggests that in 1980 a college graduate could expect to
earn about 38 percent more than a worker with only a high-school
diploma. Since then, the difference in their wages has only widened as
our economy has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the
well-educated. By 2000, that number was about 57 percent. By 2011: 73
percent.
These figures, though, reflect only part of the
inequality that has pushed the lives of college and high school
graduates in America farther apart. As the returns to education have
increased, according to Stanford economist Rebecca Diamond, the geographic segregation of the most educated workers has, too — and not by neighborhood, but by entire city.
This
effectively means that college graduates in America aren't simply
gaining access to higher wages. They're gaining access to high-cost
cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good
jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air.
"With
wage inequality, you could just observe the average wage of a college
graduate, and the average wage of a high school graduate," says Diamond,
whose research has gone a step further to calculate what she calls "economic well-being inequality."
"But then on top of that, college graduates also live in the nicest
cities in the country. They’re getting more benefits, even net of fact
that they’re paying higher housing costs."
It's easy to recognize
this phenomenon in San Francisco, or even Washington. College graduates
have flooded in, drawn by both jobs and amenities. Yet more
amenities have followed to cater to them (luring yet more college
graduates). Housing costs have increased as a result, pushing low-wage
and low-skilled workers out. At the neighborhood level, this cycle
sounds a lot like how we describe gentrification. At the scale of entire
cities — picture low-skilled workers increasingly excluded from
Washington and San Francisco and segregated into cities like Toledo or
Baton Rouge — Diamond describes this as a kind of nationwide
gentrification effect. Fist tap Dale.
