Cities like Detroit sit on one side of a growing divide among American cities, in which a small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates, and the rest struggle to keep those they have, the New York Times reports.
The winners are metro areas like Raleigh, N.C., San Francisco and Stamford, Conn., where more than 40 percent of the adult residents have college degrees. The Raleigh area has a booming technology sector and several major research universities; San Francisco has been a magnet for college graduates for decades; and metropolitan Stamford draws highly educated workers from white-collar professions in New York like finance.
In Metro Detroit, according to the ranking, 27.3 percent of the population has a four-year degree. That puts the area in 65th place, out of 100 regions ranked, better than Phoenix, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Grand Rapids, Tampa, Toledo and Memphis.
