Quality of Life and the Migration of the College-Educated: A Life-Course Approach

This paper examines how the college-educated population—segmented into selective demographic groups, from young adults to the elderly—differentially values quality-of-life (QOL) indicators of metropolitan areas in the United States. Using data from the 2000 Census and the 1997 Places Rated Almanac, out-migration patterns are shown to depend jointly upon stage in the life course, the spatial-demographic setting, and QOL characteristics. An abundance of cultural and recreational amenities lowers out-migration rates of young college-educated. For the older college-educated population, the revealed preferences shift toward concerns for safety and a strong preference for milder climates. The study also finds significantly lower out-migration rates for metropolitan areas with growing human capital. In light of shifting age distributions and rising educational attainment levels, the results have important implications for the emergence of new migration patterns and the concentration of human capital. Introduction O ne of the most popular rationales for migration is Tiebout’s observation that people “vote with their feet.” It is now widely recognized that this “migration vote” is contingent on personal characteristics including life-course attributes and on locationspecific characteristics including natural and man-made amenities. Amenities are not measures of overall residential desirability of places, but rather place-specific attributes that people differentially value at different stages of their life. It is also critical to recognize that places offer bundles of amenities: consequently migrants must sometimes take the bad with the good in choosing the place where its set of attributes best satisfies their tastes and preferences. Ronald L. Whisler is a statistical analyst at The Modellers, LLC, in Salt Lake City, UT. His email address is [email protected]. Brigitte S. Waldorf is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Gordon F. Mulligan is a professor emeritus and David A. Plane is a professor in the Department of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. The authors are grateful to Carmen CarriónFlores, Jacques Poot, and Todd Sorensen for their helpful comments, to Henry W. Herzog, Jr. for his advice on the research design, and to L. Benjamin Luzynski for his assistance with GIS. The authors thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions. Growth and Change Vol. 39 No. 1 (March 2008), pp. 58–94 Submitted August 2006; revised June 2007, September 2007; accepted October 2007. © 2008 Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148 US and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4, 2DQ, UK. Understanding the interplay of personal characteristics and amenities in migration decisions is pivotal not only because valuations of amenities may differ across life-course groups, but also because of anticipated changes in the composition of the U.S. population. Trends such as the retirement of the baby boomers and the emergence of new demographic groups like the “power couples” (Costa and Kahn 2000) will lead to shifts in the relative importance of different demographic groups. Thus, demographic changes in combination with differential valuations of quality-of-life (QOL) characteristics may trigger substantial shifts in migration patterns and, ultimately, in the nation’s population distribution. To address the joint impact of personal characteristics and amenities on the “migration vote,” this paper revisits the seminal U.S. migration study by Herzog and Schlottmann (1986). Their study was particularly important because out-migration patterns from U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) were clearly shown to depend both on the characteristics of households and on how those households assessed inter-city differences in QOL indicators. Our research takes the Herzog and Schlottmann study a step further by showing how the valuation of those amenities differs across life-course groups. Toward this end, we use a demographic segmentation approach that allows stratification of our household sample and—as suggested by Cushing (1993)—enables us to estimate separate outmigration models for several life-course groups. To the extent that amenities are differentially valued across life-course groups, migration models estimated without demographic disaggregation are misspecified in positing general effects of various place-specific amenities. In total, we distinguish between six life-course groups that reflect very different stages in the life course. Age, marital status, and presence of children distinguish these separate demographic groups. Moreover, for each life-course group, we concentrate solely on the migration behavior of the college-educated population. Three reasons justify this selection. First, the college-educated population in the United States has very high migration propensities (Kodrzycki 2001) and is thus one of the most influential driving forces for internal population redistributions. Second, in today’s knowledge-based economy, the college-educated constitute the most sought-after segment of the population. A welleducated population positively influences an area’s competitiveness and losing the collegeeducated eventually takes a toll on local economies. Thus, understanding the role of amenities—frequently postulated to be the sine qua non for a strong presence of what Florida (2002b) calls the “creative class”—in enhancing a place’s retention power is of foremost importance. Finally, from a methodological perspective, a focus on the collegeeducated ensures a certain comparability by income or, at least, by income potential. The empirical analysis draws on the site-specific amenity scores given in the 1997 Places Rated Almanac and other data on metropolitan attributes and personal characteristics made available from the 2000 U.S. Census. For each life-course group, out-migration propensities are specified as a function of amenity scores and a series of control variables. A logit framework is used for estimation. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we provide a brief overview of the literature connecting amenities, life cycle, and migration. The third section revisits and QUALITY OF LIFE AND MIGRATION OF COLLEGE-EDUCATED 59