Landlocked, cold and now No. 1 in H.S. diplomas

03/28/2005

David Peterson, Star Tribune
March 28, 2005

“I knew I’d like this city,” Hattie Dambroski said recently in her St. Paul apartment. “I didn’t know I’d fall in love with it.”

It sounds like an ad campaign. But it’s just a soft-spoken biologist speaking on a sunny spring afternoon, slightly bemused by the attachment a native Cheesehead can begin to feel after just a few months in Minnesota.

Dambroski is just the kind of person the U.S. Census Bureau will have in mind today when it announces that Minnesota is now the No. 1 state in the nation in highest percentage of residents with a high school diploma, and has moved into the top 10 in its share of adults with college degrees.

The precise rankings are less important, said state demographer Tom Gillaspy, than the evidence that a “cold state at the end of the road” is still managing to attract the bright young minds that are key to a region’s future prosperity.

Other Midwest states know that’s nothing to take for granted. Michigan has struggled, for instance, and so has Iowa, which drew nationwide headlines this winter for a proposal that would have offered young people tax incentives to live there.

Despite having one of the nation’s top public universities, Dambroski’s home state of Wisconsin trails Minnesota in both brainpower categories by miles. Its record in attracting educated people ranks with the Dakotas. Minnesota’s record more closely resembles Colorado and California.

It’s all about offering good jobs in a city with a reputation for a strong quality of life.

“Jobs are the number one thing,” said Laurie Kersten, an Iowa native who wound up here and founded the support group Twin Cities Transplants (http://www.imnotfromhere.com). “And then they want a bigger city, but one that’s livable”—a pleasant environment with lots to do.

She was reminded recently of the sometimes melancholy side to smaller-town life when she and her husband visited Des Moines, a city in the midst of a modest revival. “It felt dead,” she said. “There are great restaurants, but you go in and there are only a couple of other people eating. It’s sad.”

That’s one point critics made about Iowa’s legislative proposal to make the state a tax haven for the young. Taxes, they said, were not really what it was all about. And in fact, the idea has died a quiet death. “The bill is no longer active this session,” a legislative staff member said.

New numbers

The new data from the Census Bureau are based on an agency survey and aren’t quite as rock-solid as the census itself, which takes place every 10 years. There are larger margins for error, enough that Gillaspy doesn’t put too much stock in a state’s precise ranking.

The results have less to do with the quality of any state’s schools, he said, than migration patterns and a state’s racial and ethnic mix.

“One reason we look as good as we do is that we’re not very diverse,” he said. Nationally, the recent wave of Latin immigrants flooding Sun Belt states has been far less educated than native-born Americans.

As for the state’s apparent success in raising its collective education level so far this decade, Gillaspy said, “If we’ve seen big increases, it’s wonderful news. I don’t want to say I’m skeptical, but this is a small sample, and I’d want more data to reach a firm conclusion.”

Dambroski, whose family still lives in her hometown of Amherst, near Stevens Point, said she would love to have landed in Madison, closer to her folks, after graduating from Notre Dame with a Ph.D. The Twin Cities area was her No. 2 choice when she was hunting for jobs and Milwaukee was third.

She did a lot of Internet research. “Being single, I looked at websites that talked about good singles scenes, places to meet people, and Minneapolis was listed pretty high on a lot of websites I looked at,” she said, slipping into the way of describing the Twin Cities that will make her fellow St. Paulites grind their teeth.

She was not prepared for the traffic here, she said. Her commute isn’t so bad, but it affects her life in other ways. “My kickball league in Minneapolis starts at 6 p.m., and there’s no way I can make that. A friend and I would like to move in together, but she lives in Uptown and I don’t want to have to travel on [Interstate Hwy.] 94.”

She’s still inclined to stay a lot longer than she ever would have imagined.

“In my line of work, you can go anywhere and find a job. Since I’ve moved here, I really like the area: the music scene, the going-out scene,” she said. “I live close to Macalester [College]; I love the Grand Avenue area. People are nice, and there are trees and parks everywhere. I still have to decide the next step in my career, but I’m considering staying here. I like the feeling I get.”

Katrin Erdmann, who brought her doctorate in political science to the Twin Cities last year after stints in Boston and San Francisco, said she would return to Boston “in a heartbeat,” but puts the Twin Cities in the same general category as the other two.

“Culture is important,” she said. “And non-chain restaurants. Preferably ethnic dives. Just little dives where you can actually taste differences in cooking style. There’s a Cambodian place on University Avenue in St. Paul that’s just excellent.”

The people can be odd, though, the German native said. “Minnesotans have this ‘we should get together sometime’ thing, which basically guarantees you will never see them again.”