A 16-page effort by the website WalletHub came out early
this month. It is titled “2015’s Best
& Worst Cities to Start a Career,” and, using no fewer than 19 different
criteria, ranks the country’s 150 largest places for suitability for new
college graduates to start their professional working lives.
Within a few days, a similar recent effort also crossed my
desk. Issued by employment site
Glassdoor, it assesses the “25 best cities for jobs.” It is designed more for work seekers in
general, and incorporates only four factors:
the number of per capita job openings, Glassdoor data’s median base salary,
the area’s “median home (house) value,” and their “job satisfaction
rating.”
So what can we learn from these?
First, each piece of research has its good and bad
points. The WalletHub study used factors
ranging from median income growth rate and economic mobility to number of arts,
leisure, and recreation establishments per 100,000 inhabitants and even climate
(“weather”), and weighted them intelligently.
Instead of overall average local pay, it used monthly median starting
salary, adjusted for the area’s cost of living.
On the downside, the 150 largest American cities include many suburbs,
and breaking apart metropolitan areas was misleading; people working in
Anaheim, Garden Grove, or Santa Ana may live and use other resources in any of
those places, leaving us to wonder which of their rankings of 80th,
102nd, and 104th respectively were the most pertinent,
and if a combination, given that people could take the best from each city,
might come out higher than any of its parts.
The Glassdoor study avoids that problem, but suffers from
use of its own employment data, which may not be representative, and by using what
seem to be single-family house prices instead of a more comprehensive cost of
living measure. It does, though,
incorporate critical information in a more limited and therefore less
presumptuous set of criteria.
Second, there was a definite correlation between the studys’
results. The places turning up near the
top in both, in rough order, were Austin, Houston, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Oklahoma
City, and Raleigh, the latter finishing first in the Glassdoor effort. (After two Dallas suburbs, Austin did best in
WalletHub’s.) None of the lowest-ranking 21 in the WalletHub
study made Glassdoor’s top 25. The
largest splits may have been on Denver (not mentioned in Glassdoor, 4th
of 150 in WalletHub), Omaha (not in Glassdoor, 20th in WalletHub),
St. Louis (11th of 50 in Glassdoor, 109th in WalletHub),
and Baltimore (22nd in Glassdoor, 129th in
WalletHub). The five worst true cities
in WalletHub, none in Glassdoor’s top 25, were, from the bottom, Detroit,
Toledo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.
Third, according to these studies the bloom is off the rose
of some places previously called good for jobs.
Chicago (105th in WalletHub, 20th in Glassdoor),
Los Angeles (98th and not named), and Orlando (73rd and
not named) are nothing special now, and both New York (not in Glassdoor and 119th,
with Jersey City and Newark 74th and 125th respectively,
in WalletHub) and Las Vegas (131st in WalletHub, absent from
Glassdoor) came in well below average.
Fourth, it is always necessary with multi-component studies to
consider which criteria actually matter.
Those deviating significantly from WalletHub’s picture of what is
important to career starters in their 20s should factor out the ones they don’t
care about – those married, for example, can drop the “Single People”
Ranking.
Fifth, there are indeed massive differences between
areas. A WalletHub publicity email
broadcast named several of them: the
monthly cost-of-living-adjusted starting salary three times higher in Houston
than in Honolulu; the share of people aged 25 to 34 twice as high in Jersey
City than in Cape Coral, Florida; seven times as many per-capita arts, leisure,
and recreation establishments in Los Angeles than in Laredo; and more. In recent years, western North Dakota’s
employment boom has reminded us of these regional variations, and they are, as
almost always, real.
Sixth, though the jobs crisis is hardly over, unemployment
has eased, and it is now well worth considering relocating for better
employment conditions. They should
usually be more broad-based than one job offer, which can disappear, but with
differences such as the above, moving would be a winner for many.
Seventh, people living in this area of the country, namely
the Catskills and Poconos where few professional careers can be started, the
best overall reasonably nearby places to move, according to these two studies, are
Pittsburgh, Washington, and Boston. All
are within a half-day drive of here, and worthy of special consideration.
In all, these studies are constructive, well thought out,
and, within their limitations above, are valuable inputs to those wanting career
success. Sometimes people need to move
to get what they want, and, as WalletHub and Glassdoor correctly imply, 2015
may be one of those times.