I recently got curious about where recent college graduates are living. My most recent post on Michigan Future, Inc.'s site includes the following analysis based on data that I pulled from the 2015 ACS:
A whopping 36 percent of [college educated millennials] live in one of ten Metro areas. In other words, the ten MSAs who have the greatest number of college-educated Millennials have over one-third of the entire country’s population.
It would be easy to explain this simply as, “Bigger cities will have more of everything.” To some extent that’s true. Except that: (1) It doesn’t make the fact that college educated Millennials are choosing big cities somehow irrelevant. It’s the main thing these people are choosing: lots of people, high density, and a strongly urban lifestyle. And (2) Each of the top ten metros—and many of the others—has a higher share of educated Millennials than its share of the nation’s population...
We also added up the number of college-educated 25-34 year-olds in all of the remaining metros that have a total population over one million (in 2015, there were 53 metros above this threshold). The remaining MSAs in the top 53 list host 33 percent of the college-educated Millennials in the country. Then 25 percent of the nation’s college-educated Millennials live in the remaining Metros.
This means that only six percent of college-educated Millennials live outside of an MSA.
You can read the full post here, which includes some recommended priorities for Michigan's public policy.