CLEVELAND, OHIO — May 13, 2005 — When it comes to having a highly-educated work force that knowledge-based businesses require, the Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco Bay area, San Jose, and the Raleigh-Cary metro areas are the best locations in the U.S., according to a study published by Expansion Management magazine in its May issue.
Expansion Management, a Penton Media publication, is a monthly business magazine for executives of companies actively looking for the best place to expand or relocate their facilities within the next one to three years. Its editorial focus is to help growing companies evaluate future locations.
“As more companies engage in the knowledge sector of the economy, competition for highly educated workers will become even more intense,” said King “Metros with a concentration of these workers will prosper, while those that don’t, won’t.”
California has the most “Five-Star Knowledge Worker Metros,” a distinction the magazine awards to the top 20 percent of metro areas in its studies. There are a total of 362 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States (plus eight in Puerto Rico), as designated by the Office of Management and Budget. Following California were New York, with five metros receiving the five-star designation, Colorado and Texas with four, and Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, each with three. For a list of this year’s “Five-Star Knowledge Worker Metros,” click on the “Related Link” above.
“The United States’ relative advantage in the world economy will be in knowledge-based industries, and that requires an increasingly well-educated work force,” said King.
In order to calculate its rankings, the magazine focused on three broad areas: human capital, educational institutions and R&D spending. The study compared the college educated work force in each metro area in the United States, paying particular attention to advanced degrees (masters, Ph.D. and medical degrees), the percentage of a metro’s adult population employed in science & engineering jobs, the number and type of colleges and universities in a metro area (including community colleges), and the amount of science and engineering R&D spending by the metro area’s research universities, all in order to come up with a comparative ranking of the depth of a metro’s knowledge-based work force.
“Employers need intelligent workers who can grasp new ideas and concepts quickly, who can think for themselves and who can visualize the big picture,” said Bill King, chief editor of Expansion Management. “It used to be that a high school diploma was the ticket to the middle class. Nowadays, one in four adults over the age of 25 possesses at least a bachelor’s degree, and in some metros — Boulder, Colo., for example — that figure exceeds 50 percent.”
Expansion Management magazine is mailed to more than 45,000 CEOs, vice presidents, directors and other officers of companies that have indicated they are considering expanding into new geographic areas.
To read the article, “America’s Super Cities of the Future,” go to Expansion Management’s Web site at www.ExpansionManagement.com and look under RESEARCH STUDIES.
Means the article is accessible only to our magazine subscribers.
