Pittsburgh ranks 13th in Forbes Best Cities for Young Professionals (York: neighborhoods, top school)

[lifepgh2op]

Pittsburgh climbed up to 13 this year in Forbes magazines ranking of Best Cities for Young Professionals.

"Strong performing companies like Allegheny Technologies, Ansoft and Consol Energy have helped lift Pittsburgh's post-industrial economy and gave the city a No. 2 ranking in its concentration of top firms from our 400 best big companies and 200 best small companies lists. But Pittsburgh still lags behind when it comes to salaries and attracting graduates, landing at 32 and 22 by those measures."

Pittsburgh: Top City For Young Professionals To Live - Pittsburgh News Story - WTAE Pittsburgh (http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/16891905/detail.html - broken link)

Best Cities For Young Professionals - Forbes.com

[BrianTH]

Obviously good news overall for Pittsburgh, but I think the methodology is a little screwy. Most notably, the "attracting graduates" ranking seems bound to distort the results. Here is their summary of that category:

We started by tracking the graduates from a cadre of elite schools around the country who have the ability to go virtually anywhere to follow their professional interests. By looking at where the class of 1998 from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Rice, Northwestern and Duke settled 10 years later, we get a good sense of where the top-notch jobs for young people exist.

. . .

Our methodology remained the same this year except for one measure. Instead of disqualifying graduates from Stanford who, 10 years out of school, were in California--or Duke graduates living in North Carolina and Harvard grads in Boston, for example--we counted them toward a city's total.

We did this for two reasons. First, because it cannot be assumed that graduates from 1998 living in the same state as their alma mater have been there since commencement. In 10 years a Rice grad could have lived in Chicago, New York, London and Miami before moving to Houston or Dallas. Second, we decided it should not be a mark against a city that graduates from nearby schools found strong opportunities.

As a result, Houston and Chicago made large strides in this year's list.

Now I kinda understand their second point--retaining graduates from local schools should still count as a positive. But then you can't limit the list of schools to just six, because that will obviously help out the primary markets for those six schools. Indeed, you would probably be better off looking at just Harvard, say, and then discounting for Boston specifically, as opposed to including schools like Rice and Northwestern--not that the latter aren't very good schools, but there are well more than six school of comparable quality, and as Forbes noted including them gave Houston and Chicago respectively a bump.

And a final comment about this category: they are looking at graduates ten years out, which again makes some sense, but it also means this measure isn't going to capture the effects of relative dynamics over the last ten years. For example, the housing price differential for certain markets increased dramatically over the last ten years, and even the recent pullback hasn't come close to erasing that increased differential (particularly if you look specifically at the neighborhoods most likely to be populated by the professional class).

Now if you graduated from a top school ten years ago in 1998 and were choosing a destination, you wouldn't know all this was coming. But recent graduates have been aware of this, and I wonder if that may in fact lead to cities with hyperexpensive housing falling in this category as this ten-year window moves forward into the period of hyperexpensive housing.

[Katiana]

I read a little of the article; the slide show was hard for me to watch with my DSL, so I gave up at about city # 37 (shown in reverse order). I hadn't really gotten out of Florida at that point.

The methodology for all these "studies" is a little screwy, as Brian put it. It's the criteria chosen that make the rankings.

Our methodology remained the same this year except for one measure. Instead of disqualifying graduates from Stanford who, 10 years out of school, were in California--or Duke graduates living in North Carolina and Harvard grads in Boston, for example--we counted them toward a city's total.

So they're saying that in the past they did discount the above? How nuts is that? I have seen some data from Cal Tech, where my DH graduated. Many of their graduates end up staying in California. Is that such a surprise? Should that count against California, that a CA college can graduate people who want to stay there? I mean, I guess it doesn't matter, since they changed it, but I'm sure last year their survey came out as the gospel truth as well and was posted on many a website as "proof" that a city was the up and coming place. It really is an unrealistic (or at least untested) assumption that graduates of those "elite" schools choose their job location much differently than everyone else, and w/o regard to family, geographic preferences, etc. I think this tells us we shouldn't put too much stock in these things, even from a respected magazine like Forbes.

[lifepgh2op]

Yeah, I kinda figured there'd be some weird data involved but I had to post it anyway since they did make the list and somewhat high (more for company aspect rather than college issues).