BTW places my career (investment real estate) took me for work–Austin, Seattle, LA, Chicago twice, Atlanta. Not that horrible and I enjoyed aspects of each.
Now happily retired in Central Virginia but thinking about going back to Thousand Oaks CA where I lived in the 70s and first got into real estate. Also to show how unpredictable life can be I met my wife In Seattle. The kicker was we had been together in our NJ small town HS before I left for college in 1967 and she moved on. We both ended up living 3000 miles away in Seattle not knowing each was there. 35 years later we reconnected and were married in 2003. Life is a ride.
People, not least educated young people, are often more adaptable than they realize, and for that matter many places have more variety than they realize. So I think most such people can eventually find areas/neighborhoods to suit their preferences in most metros where they would have good career prospects.
And then, you know, they might actually be able to afford their favorite places too.
I agree with all of the above and I think it is certainly the reality of needing to work and support oneself. Sometimes moving is the only option and/or the only option available if one wants career movement.
My only pushback is as someone who grew up in an ethnic enclave surrounded by aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins in an area close to families who had migrated from the same handful of cities in other countries. I think that for some young adults, the desire to stay close to home is not just about wanting to live in only cool places or being picky about their living situation.
On a practical level, the desire to stay put can be about the child care, domestic or even rental support that an extended family can provide. On an emotional level, it can be about valuing close knit ties above some other financial benefits. Obviously, you can build a similar level of emotional support with a family of choice (instead of a family of origin) and you may find your cultural community in a new place). But actually, it was not until adulthood and having my own children when I realized how great it was to see my grandparents, great aunts/uncles, and my parents’ siblings on a near weekly basis as a child. No playdates or arranged extracurricular activities for me. At least until I was in my early/mid teens, I did nothing after school or on the weekend beyond spending time with a multiage group of cousins, second cousins, and “adopted” (because you were never quite sure how they were actually related) cousins. My own kids have had less of that experience because my extended family is more scattered now, but my parents have been nearby for most of their childhood, and it has been fantastic –not something that I would have given up lightly.
Leaving a home city can also be fantastic. It can provide a great opportunity to meet new people and build resiliency. It can also get you the h*** away from toxic folks or offer a new start. Plus if you don’t spread your wings as a young adult, you might find yourself stuck and regretting it in middle-age. So I would never suggest that someone turn down a job in one place if the consequence of turning down that job is being unemployed and unable to support themselves. However, for some people, the choice to leave is like stepping off the edge of the world, particularly when it involves leaving a family or ethnic enclave. It can be a huge leap of faith and not at all an obvious decision. It rubs me the wrong way when I hear others talk about the desire to stay close to home as something petulant or a sign of immaturity. It is truly OK to value family ties, heritage, and history; unfortunately one can value those things and still be unable to make it work financially. I guess you can be like my family though, when one person relocates, generally a few siblings, parent, or cousins come with. So while we are more scattered these days, very few of us are really truly alone unless it is by choice.
I like the idea of broadening the focus beyond the usual narrow one we see. That said, I think using terms like “adjective-ivy” actually reinforces the notion that everything else is second best to an ivy.
I also think to take this more seriously the focus needs to be more than just a “top 10” list each year, especially given as noted the “turnover” in the public college list. I know we have a healthy level of cynicism about rankings here but a lot of people aren’t aware of all the nuances. Something that was in the top 10 last year but isn’t this year or vice versa can’t reflect any real change in the quality of education available at that college.
Yes, it can be tough moving away from a home area and established support network, and I don’t mean to suggest there is something wrong about valuing that.
But sometimes that does have financial and possibly career costs, possibly large costs. That potential tradeoff is built into the way the US does things economically.
But I’m not talking about abandoning all hope of raising children near cousins and grandparents and the endless parade of aunts and uncles. I’m talking about a two year stint at a historical society in Indiana (when you have no ties in Indiana) because you want to be a museum archivist and the Smithsonian isn’t hiring right now (and won’t be for at least another three years by my math). And when the Smithsonian isn’t hiring- that means 25 or so museums in the metro DC area won’t be hiring either.
Or the budding talent with a degree in mass communications/similar. When there’s a cool job working for a public television station in Ames, Iowa or Topeka where you get to do EVERYTHING- write, produce, schedule, work closely with talent, acquire programming produced by other outlets- the notion that you’re going to “hold out” for a job in Austin or wait to get the phone call from CNN- that’s not how television works. Comms folks move up to bigger and more prestigious markets once they have experience. Syracuse leads to Boston- Boston isn’t hiring someone (necessarily) with one internship and a summer job editing the weather report no matter where you were.
And you all know my endless griping about finance majors. Yes, it would have been great to get an offer from Goldman Sachs which would lead to a job with Bridgewater or TPG two years later which will lead to hitting your FIRE number after a decade. But honestly, that job working for a Pepsi bottler in Cincinnati which has you rotating from the pricing team to the operations/delivery team to the raw materials sourcing team could be a dream come true. And you’ll be management in a union environment- practically speaking, better than grad school. You’d learn a ton. And it’s not a lifetime- it’s 24 months before you have marketable skills to go back home and live surrounded by family with a great job.
Holding out when you are 22 and only have internship experience in a competitive labor market- be prepared to wait even with the world’s greatest hustling skills.
Some six months later, the Brookings Institute has this report. Says when, for 900 years the university system specialized in access to scarce knowledge, what is its proper role with rise of AI providing abundant access to knowledge, though there may be errors and omissions in the AI answers:
“What has changed in the past few years is not simply access to information but the cognitive layer itself. AI does not merely provide information. It explains, customizes, gives feedback, and synthesizes the type of work that justified the lecture hall and office hours. This is in line with what Benjamin Bloom identified in 1984 as the “two-sigma problem”: one-on-one tutoring produced learning outcomes two standard deviations better than classroom instruction but tutoring at scale was economically impossible. For 40 years the problem was unsolved, blocked not by pedagogy but by economics. AI has now removed the economic barrier: Every student can have a patient, responsive tutor on demand. Whether these systems reliably reproduce Bloom’s full two-sigma gain remains an open empirical question. But it is clear the constraint that made one-on-one explanation a luxury has collapsed.
This does not mean AI is correct, complete, or unbiased. In fact, it is none of those things consistently. But universities no longer have a near-monopoly on knowledge production and dissemination. The student no longer needs to come to campus to receive an explanation of the invisible hand, the second law of thermodynamics, or the Federalist Papers. The explanation comes to each of them, on demand, in whatever form and at whatever time they request. The boundary that defined the institution for nine centuries has, in a single technological generation, become quite porous if not disappearing in total.”
“ What the modern university was actually selling
To see why this matters, it helps to be precise about what the modern university bundles together. Three products are sold under a single tuition price.
The first is content delivery, including lectures, readings, and problem sets, that transmit established knowledge from those who hold it to those who do not. This is a student’s daily experience, and it has been the primary justification for the university’s cost and time since the rise of the industrial mass university in the late 19th century.
The second is credentialing—the degree as a signal to the labor market that its holder has completed a recognized program at a recognized institution. The credential is what employers actually purchase when they require a bachelor’s or master’s degree, and it is what makes the university economically essential for most students even when the content could be acquired elsewhere.
The third is networking and formation. Networking is the slower, harder-to-measure work of meeting people, establishing connections, joining an intellectual community, and entering jobs, communities, and professional circles that follow from them. Formation is the cultivation of judgment, ethical sensibility, and the capacity to think seriously under uncertainty. Both happen through sustained relationships with faculty and fellow students, through encounters with hard cases, through participation in traditions of inquiry, and through the experience of being taken seriously as a thinking person by people who have lived a life of inquiry themselves.
For roughly a century this bundle held together. Content delivery was a visible product. Credentialing followed automatically from completing the content. Networking and formation came along almost as a byproduct of the time students spent on campus with faculty and peers.
AI breaks this bundle in multiple ways. Content delivery is the factory’s production line, and it is the most substitutable component. A capable AI tutor, integrated with course materials, can increasingly deliver explanation and feedback at a quality that exceeds the average large-lecture experience, meaning the part of the university that most resembles a factory is the part most exposed to automation. Credentialing remains sticky but is under pressure. Employers across technology, finance, and government have announced moves toward skills-based hiring, though research suggests practice still lags the proclamations. Networking and formation are the hardest for AI to replicate, because they are fundamentally relational and embodied in personal networks. They require human judgment encountering other human judgment over time, in conditions of mutual stakes.”
Of course, with married couples both pursuing their own jobs and careers, mobility is reduced, because relocating for a better opportunity for one spouse may result in reduced opportunities for the other spouse. If there are kids in the picture, that can also complicate things, due to disruption of moving to different schools, losing access to existing child care (e.g. grandparents) and the like.
Manhattan University is another “employer-friendly” college which is embracing AI. Being ranked 52nd and 73rd respectively in 2025 and 2026 on the Wall Street Journal’s list of America’s Best Colleges speaks to its standing as being employer friendly as that is at the core of these rankings. In addition, they are committed to having every student develop AI literacy via their “Fundamentals of AI” course, required for all freshmen. They are targeting jobs in Silicon Alley, the booming tech start up area of lower Manhattan, for their graduates.