Justin Fox, Columnist

Where the Educated Millennials Congregate

Residents of some cities complain about being overrun with young college graduates. But it’s a nice problem to have.

May 22, 2019 at 4:00 PM UTC

Corrected

May 23, 2019 at 7:05 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Jersey City, where the millennials are.
Photographer: Peter Foley/Bloomberg

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Longtime San Francisco residents complain that their city has been overrun by young, well-educated software engineers, data scientists and the like who drive up housing prices, ride around on electric scooters and just generally ruin everything.

Census Bureau data offer some support for this complaint, at least the part about there being lots of well-educated young folks in town. One in 5 San Francisco residents in 2017 was a college graduate aged 25 to 34. That’s really high! Among the 100 largest1 American cities and city-like entities (Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, is technically a county, but Virginia does things a little different from other states), though, it’s not quite the highest: