Breathtaking statistics, about educated people fleeing Rick Perry's Lone Star State while he has been Governor, lurk in this Front Page post's interactive maps and statistical tables. Looking at changes in populations of persons over 25 with college degrees versus such persons without degrees between the 2000 and 2010 census, what jumped off the page was this stark observation: Of the top twenty U.S. Counties in size of net loss of their more educated population, seven comprise most of the biggest population centers in just one state, Texas: Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Brownsville, McAllen and El Paso. All finished the decade with relatively less educated populations. Only Austin missed the cut.
The same interactive maps in the aforementioned post show most of the country's other larger cities becoming relatively better educated. Not so, Texas. According to these figures there are relatively 716,761 fewer college graduates among persons over the age of 25 in the major population centers Texas since Rick Perry took the helm.
To explain this trend I would think that either fewer people in Texas are becoming educated as the over 25 population grows, or that fewer educated people are among those contributing to population growth or that educated people are simply leaving Texas. It's probably a mixture of things like that, but the statistics provided in the aforesaid post do not answer such questions. Nevertheless, compared to other parts of the country with substantial population centers, Texas, under Perry, appears to be suffering a depletion of access to a more educated population and workforce.
I have many friends and loved ones in Texas and lived there for many years. I know that Texas could be the great state it pretends to be in its school propaganda and that many wonderful, hard-working progressives are working to make it that way every day. It saddens me deeply to see yet another piece of solid evidence of the terrible harm that Republican mis-governance inflicts there.