Metropolitan America: More Educated, Affluent, Ethnically Diverse; Census Offers Close Look at National Trends
College-educated Americans are increasingly concentrated in the nation's metropolitan areas, new census figures show, drawn by white-collar job growth and settling into a lifestyle based on higher incomes, longer commutes and a more expensive house farther out in the suburbs.</br></br>Taken together, the figures provide a detailed look at metropolitan life, which now encompasses more than three-quarters of the population and increasingly defines the future of the nation. They also show the widening gap - in income, education and ethnic diversity - between the 284 metro areas and rural and small-town regions.</br></br>"Who is moving from rural areas? It's clearly the younger, the better educated, the ones in managerial occupations," said William O'Hare, director of population and policy research at the University of Louisville. "It's a push-pull. The jobs are seldom available in rural areas and more available in metro areas. That drains the people who might revive the rural areas."</br></br>Behind the statistics, the most detailed yet for metro areas from the 1990 census, are communities as diverse as the Bronx ghetto, the main street of Enid, Okla., and the far suburban subdivisions of Loudoun County.</br></br>"There's much more divergence than there was in 1970" among the metro areas, said William Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan. That is due in part to the suburban sprawl into communities that feel more rural than urban.