How’s the rest of the Rust Belt (including MKE) doing in attracting college grads?

One of the most e-mailed New York Times articles last week covered “ a growing divide” among American metro areas between those that are and those that are not serving as magnets for college grads. The emphasis in the story was definitely on the “are not,” with Dayton getting plenty of attention as a representative of a Rust Belt struggling to reinvent itself — and struggling to hold onto college grads. 

But as the full dataset from the Brookings Institution shows (in a handy map viewer), Midwestern “Rust Belt” metros vary quite a bit in the extent to which the attract college-educated populations.

On one end is indeed Dayton, where just 24 percent of metro area residents have a four-year degree, but Minneapolis cracks the top-10 with 37.9 percent. The emerging (and rather homogeneous) Madison metro area ranks 5th nationally, not far behind Washington D.C., where nearly 47% of residents have four-year degrees

Milwaukee holds its own at 31.7 percent, ahead of metros such as St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Indianapolis. Looking at the map, it’s intriguing to think of what could have been but won’t be — a Midwestern “knowledge cluster” of Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago linked by high-speed rail. And with the recovery lagging in Wisconsin and its metro areas (see another handy Brookings map), it would obviously help to see a quickening of the economic pace before a bigger share of college grads start migrating elsewhere.