Pittsburgh: genius or not?

Mike mentioned some time ago this was in the pipeline… Pittsburgh Community Television will be airing the premier of Pittsburgh Genius on Monday, July 3, 2006 on Comcast Channel 21. The show will highlight just a few of the people who work in the region and make it a “pre-eminent creative and intellectual center”.

A confounding corollary to this, the Pittsburgh Business Times is reporting this week that Pittsburgh is just average when it comes to the educational attainment of the local population. How can this be given our plethora of local educational institutions. Well, we are an old region. The older generation across the country typically did not go to graduate school, college or even high school at the rates we do now. The typical way to measure this type of benchmark is the prevalance of those with college degrees age 35 and over. But by comingling the educational attainment of younger and older age cohorts, all you really get is an artifact of the elderly age demographic here... and you get nothing about the educational attainment of the workforce or of younger parts of the population where most of the hiring happens. This story pops up every year it seems. In fact, last year the same publication called me when they were thinking of doing this same exact story and I think I convinced the PBT that was not really meaningful in a Pittsburgh context. Whether becasue of my prodding or not, I never saw a story run.... alas, not this year. If you are interested more representative age adjusted benchmarks, I have some for the region and the city.