Escaping the Bubble but Still Finding Happiness, Part I: College Towns
AEIdeas
January 09, 2017
Finding a zip code that is out of the bubble is easy. Recall what I pointed out in an earlier post: The statistical relationship between a zip code’s SES and the Bubble Quiz score is driven by the percentage of adults with college degrees, not median family income. In zip codes where fewer than 50% of the adults have college degrees, the odds are 75% that the mean bubble score is at least 40, which is my definition of the threshold for an unbubbly zip code (the estimated national mean is 45). Since 92% of America’s zip codes have fewer than 50% college graduates, that gives you a huge choice of unbubbly zip codes.
The campus of Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA. Twenty20.
But people with the tastes and preferences that give them low Bubble Quiz scores probably don’t want to live in one of those zip codes. They probably want to live someplace where their neighbors get their jokes — a shorthand way of saying that, to be happy, most people need to live near enough other people who share their tastes and preferences. Not everybody, but enough. It’s a matter of culture. New Yorker cartoons and South Park are each funny in their own way, but a lot of people don’t think one of the pair is funny at all.
Let’s put the problem of choosing a place to live in terms of a young couple who are cadet members of the new upper class. They both have IQs north of 120, are college-educated, and at least one of them has a professional or graduate degree. They also have a toddler. They are in occupations that give them freedom about where to live (they don’t have to live in or near New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Boston).
Where should they settle down? To find enough common ground, they require a neighborhood where some of their neighbors are also smart, college-educated, and interested in the same kinds of things they’re interested in. On the other hand, they have taken to heart the reasons not to seclude themselves, and particularly their child, within a new-upper-class bubble. They need a neighborhood where they will find close friends but also be part of a milieu that is integrated with mainstream America.
The easiest solution is the one I’m going to offer today: Move to a college town. Our couple can choose their home in a neighborhood where faculty tend to live. That will take care of the “enough” problem. But the town also has other kinds of neighborhoods, other kinds of people, and the life of the town or city connects them. It doesn’t always work out that way, so our couple needs to check out whether town-and-gown hostility is a problem. But there are many towns where the college is just one part of a functional community.
The most obvious college towns to examine are the ones where major public universities are located. Most of them are not in major cities, nor are they located in places that are notably affluent. To prepare the table shown below, I looked at the towns or cities where the flagship university of each state is located. Those aren’t the only potential public university towns worth considering. In many states, both of the two top universities (or even more) are of high quality. For California and New York, I considered the four largest comprehensive universities in their state systems. In all of the material I’m about to present, zip codes had to be represented by at least 10 bubble scores.
The table includes all the universities located in a place where the mean bubble score of the entire town or city was 40 or higher. In the case of a town so small that it had a single zip code, the “Bubble Score for the City” column adds in scores from zip codes adjoining the town. The list is ordered from the highest to lowest bubble mean for the city.
I then looked for some other promising college towns for our hypothetical couple to consider. First, I determined the Bubble Quiz scores from zip codes containing elite colleges (defined as those listed as Tier I by Barrons). They qualified if the mean score from respondents in that zip code was 40 or higher. Then I looked for zip codes containing colleges that didn’t qualify as elite in the Barrons listing, but that met two other criteria: a mean score of at least 40 and at least 50 percent of adults in the zip code with college degrees. Here’s the list of college zip codes that survived either of these two sets selection criteria, again ordered from highest to lowest mean Bubble Quiz score.
There’s something in the two tables for every taste. If our couple puts a high premium on being near an elite college, zip codes for Four Tier I colleges from the Barrons list are on it — Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Washington & Lee, and Colorado College, plus Colgate, ranked 12th in the current US News list of National Liberal Arts Colleges.
Do they want to live near a major city? They have Denver, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Atlanta (near Athens), Oklahoma City (near Edmond and Norman), and Colorado Springs to choose from. But the list is much richer in towns that are unlikely to have crossed our couple’s radar screen—places like Bozeman in Montana and Laramie in Wyoming. And if they want to go to God’s country, there’s Ames and Iowa City (I’m betraying a little personal prejudice here).
Remember that the couple isn’t going to attend the university or college themselves. They’re just looking for places to live where they can have enough people who share their tastes and preferences, All of the towns in both tables easily meet that requirement.
The big lacuna in my list of college towns is urban zip codes in major cities. But if that’s what our couple really wants, I’ve got semi-good news for them: There are some possibilities. Not in Manhattan or Brooklyn or Boston or the District of Columbia or San Francisco. But I’ve got a few zip codes near Los Angeles and a bunch in other big cities. And if a big city isn’t a requirement, I’ve got about 300 zip codes in some smaller cities and towns that could be great places to live. I’ll tell you about them in a few days.
Related
