Town, Gown, and Unemployment

by Richard Florida

It's clear that the economic crisis is having uneven impacts on different types of workers and different kinds of communities. Highly educated people and highly educated places are holding up much better than others.

But among the most stable places in the current downturn are college towns.

Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for March 2009, Martin Prosperity Institute researcher Patrick Adler put together the following graph which plots the unemployment rate for various states, major commercial cities, and college towns. The results speak for themselves: