Flashes of Panic

Our local NPR station woke me up this morning with news of a Brookings Institute study (maybe this one?) suggesting that our area has been losing college graduates in the mid-20s to mid-30s at a faster rate than nearly any other place in the country. Presumably they accounted for the concentration of higher education and the fact that we import non-college-graduates and make them graduates, whereupon they migrate to Boston and New York City at a pretty high rate.

This was augmented by quotes from a professor at the UMass B-school who said that the high rate made things look pretty bad, but in fact the problem was that we simply didn't have many people in that demographic to begin with.

This is no surprise; this area is saturated with kids with still-wet undergrad degrees, while most of the "good" jobs available are for those with graduate degrees, years of experience, or both.

Meanwhile, I live in a town where I feel like everyone is much younger than me, or much older than me.

[Update: No link on the website; WFCR doesn't post "shorter stories" so I can't cite my original. Dang. Hope the Gazette picks it up, though a cursory glance at their site this afternoon suggests not.]