Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
BajanYankee - I'm really curious where your college alumni data came from. Seems like an interesting data set. Please post the link to it (and also if you're going to bring up data you should cite your source - but mostly I am just interested in the data itself. I tried to look for a few university numbers and couldn't find it even on their official alumni sites).
I mentioned earlier that it was tabulated using LinkedIn. That is the best any of us can do.
Okay - well that sucks. That's definitely not accurate if you are getting your numbers from social media.
Funny you would say that (I anticipated this response). 177 million Americans have LinkedIn accounts. Of course, not every single college degree holder will be on LinkedIn, but it's become such a comprehensive tool that universities find it easier to track their alumni using that than they do using their more conventional, outdated methods (i.e., counting up alumni dues paying members, phone surveys, etc.).
And if we're being honest, it's not like Census numbers are 100% ironclad since they have to deal with non-responses and in some cases outright lying. They are figures derived from sampling, which can often lead to severe undercounts among some populations.
First, posters claimed that college degrees were a proxy for intellectualism. That assumes that people with a college degree are, on average, more "intellectual" than those without one. That's not an entirely unreasonable assumption. But if we are to assume that, we should also assume that people admitted to more selective schools are, on average, more "intellectual." But that seems to be something posters are unwilling to concede since it's the knife slicing the other way. If you're going to live by the sword, then you have to die by it as well.
Second, how do you evaluate which cities are more "intellectual" without trafficking in stereotypes? One reason that you might "question whether it is particularly intellectual" is that you have a pre-conceived, biased notion of what the city is, as if the entire culture of a 15 million+ metro can be defined by Malibu and Beverly Hills. I actually think a lot of what posters consider "creative" or "intellectual" on here is based on superficiality.
Third, I think there's a question over whether any U.S. city has much of an "intellectual" crowd at all, that is, if we are not to assume that intellectualism is synonymous with scholastic achievement. The U.S. has never really been a hotbed of intellectual movements and theory the way Europe has been. So if the standard for "intellectual" is clusters of mostly young university students and leftists crammed into dark bistros trying to figure out how to apply the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation to achieve a state of constant revolution, then that's virtually non-existent in the U.S. Noam Chomsky tells stories about the Lower East Side being a hornet's nest of this type of intellectualism back in the 1940s, but that's a thing of the past, and all those independent book dealers have been mostly replaced with Thai restaurants, Starbucks and cupcake shops.
As I was perusing this thread, this precise reaction was slowly building up in my brain. And then I came across this post, which pretty much exactly says what I was thinking but could not have articulated as nicely. Well done!
This premise of counting college degree holders as a proxy for "intellectualism" is incredibly shallow. As stated above, the sad truth is that the US is not a terribly intellectual place, in the way that most of the world thinks about it. I think a very small fraction of the population would be in that category. Certainly not ~35% just because these people managed to get into some run of the mill state school. I think from that perspective BajanYankee's method of looking at elite schools is probably a more accurate method even though that also has its own shortcomings (and he's looking at those numbers just to make a point about this whole degree counting game).
Comparing entire metros in this category doesn't seem to be a very useful exercise and just trades in absurd stereotypes, leading to such gems as "Chicago has such a diverse economy, whereas LA's acting/music culture is unintellectual". Maybe the better question is in which metro can an "intellectual" thrive, expressing his/her ideas openly without feeling like a complete outsider? And I think both metros will easily give you that if you move to the right neighborhoods. So maybe a way to compare cities is to ask is what fraction of each metro would provide a comfortable place to live for such an intellectual?
As I was perusing this thread, this precise reaction was slowly building up in my brain. And then I came across this post, which pretty much exactly says what I was thinking but could not have articulated as nicely. Well done!
This premise of counting college degree holders as a proxy for "intellectualism" is incredibly shallow. As stated above, the sad truth is that the US is not a terribly intellectual place, in the way that most of the world thinks about it. I think a very small fraction of the population would be in that category. Certainly not ~35% just because these people managed to get into some run of the mill state school. I think from that perspective BajanYankee's method of looking at elite schools is probably a more accurate method even though that also has its own shortcomings (and he's looking at those numbers just to make a point about this whole degree counting game).
Comparing entire metros in this category doesn't seem to be a very useful exercise and just trades in absurd stereotypes, leading to such gems as "Chicago has such a diverse economy, whereas LA's acting/music culture is unintellectual". Maybe the better question is in which metro can an "intellectual" thrive, expressing his/her ideas openly without feeling like a complete outsider? And I think both metros will easily give you that if you move to the right neighborhoods. So maybe a way to compare cities is to ask is what fraction of each metro would provide a comfortable place to live for such an intellectual?
Pure speculation, what you're asking people to compare. Completely open to someone's bias.
Funny you would say that (I anticipated this response). 177 million Americans have LinkedIn accounts. Of course, not every single college degree holder will be on LinkedIn, but it's become such a comprehensive tool that universities find it easier to track their alumni using that than they do using their more conventional, outdated methods (i.e., counting up alumni dues paying members, phone surveys, etc.).
I want to point out one thing first - As of 2017, around 70 million people living in America today have Bachelor's degrees or higher. Another ~18 million have an Associate's degree (2 year college). Another almost 60 million people went to college for a little bit but never actually got a degree. LinkedIn allows you to post that you went to a college, but it doesn't indicate if you actually truthfully received a degree from there. Keep that in mind.
LinkedIn is probably an alright indicator, but there is still error in it. You are assuming everyone tells the truth about where they went (whereas in the Census they don't care where you went so there's less reason to lie).
For the record, I am a hiring manager at one of the largest companies in the world and I've seen my fair share of lying on LinkedIn with our candidates which exactly mirrors their resumes. How do I know? Because we've had multiple people where we went through with accepting them into a position only to have them fail a background check because they lied about where they got a degree from on their resume, which was in line with their LinkedIn profiles for the record. And usually the lie was only about where they went to college - they usually put down a better college because they think we care where people actually went to school (we don't). So instead of saying they went to SUNY Albany or something, they'd claim they went to NYU because again people still think that where you went to school matters to a lot of people hiring when in fact in 2019, it doesn't.
I'm not saying it's rampant, but just keep that in mind and I've personally seen it numerous times for my actual job as a hiring manager. LinkedIn has alright data, but to post exact numbers from it is probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit unless you preface it with the fact that it's from LinkedIn.
Quote:
And if we're being honest, it's not like Census numbers are 100% ironclad since they have to deal with non-responses and in some cases outright lying. They are figures derived from sampling, which can often lead to severe undercounts among some populations.
Totally agree, but they represent a better truth than the majority of social media data. And again, people are less prone to lie on this (but some do for sure).
I'm not saying it's rampant, but just keep that in mind and I've personally seen it numerous times for my actual job as a hiring manager. LinkedIn has alright data, but to post exact numbers from it is probably getting ahead of ourselves a little bit unless you preface it with the fact that it's from LinkedIn.
I don't think the idea is to be "exact." The same way the BLS occupational numbers are not "exact." Not even Census data is really "exact" and this is especially so today with ICE raids happening everyday. We can look to LinkedIn to get some idea of the gap between Chicago and Los Angeles when it comes to the alumni of Top 25 schools, and there is no conceivable way that Chicago can close a gap of 230,000, even if we are to assume the numbers are off by 30,000 +/-. The data would be less instructive if the gap between the two cities were, say, 25,000.
Funny you would say that (I anticipated this response). 177 million Americans have LinkedIn accounts. Of course, not every single college degree holder will be on LinkedIn, but it's become such a comprehensive tool that universities find it easier to track their alumni using that than they do using their more conventional, outdated methods (i.e., counting up alumni dues paying members, phone surveys, etc.).
And if we're being honest, it's not like Census numbers are 100% ironclad since they have to deal with non-responses and in some cases outright lying. They are figures derived from sampling, which can often lead to severe undercounts among some populations.
You make some good points
My wife and I have LinkedIn accounts.
Neither one of us participate with our universities or alumni associations. She gets phone calls (usually soliciting money), but she graduated this decade and they have her cell. My school has my address from 20 year ago.
The last census I filled out was 1990’s when I was a teenager and my Dad gave me $10 to do it. Everyone I’ve received at home since has found it’s way to the trash can.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
