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Not only do degreed people earn more, more degrees generate better jobs.
By BILL COATS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 18, 2002
TAMPA -- Carl Zielonka, a dentist, lives next door to a lawyer and a pilot on Harbour Island. Farther down is a physician, a retired physician, another lawyer, a psychiatrist and a few business executives.
"Probably all have college degrees," Zielonka said. "I don't really know of anybody that doesn't have a college degree."
That's understandable. Harbour Island led Hillsborough County's 249 census tracts in educational attainment, according to statistics released Tuesday by the U.S. Census. Among adults 25 and older, 74 percent of Harbour Island's residents reported having a bachelor's degree or higher in the 2000 census.
Not surprisingly, a Hillsborough map featuring college degrees resembles a map of affluent neighborhoods. Educated people tend to parlay their knowledge into lucrative lives.
The Hillsborough County neighborhoods with the most college degrees include some of the most exclusive addresses around Tampa: clusters of bayfront neighborhoods in South Tampa and the biggest, newest, master-planned developments in the suburbs.
"The best predictor of levels of education is socioeconomic status," said Maralee Mayberry, a University of South Florida professor and expert on the sociology of education. "The numbers are just consistent across the board."
The educational levels of Hillsborough County's overall population improved during the 1990s. In 1990, 20.2 percent of the county's adults held bachelor's or post-graduate degrees, trailing the national average by a hair. By 2000, the national average had risen to 24.4 percent. But Hillsborough's number had climbed to 25.1 percent.
"I think that's terrific," said Steve Permuth, a USF professor of educational leadership and policy studies. "I would be absolutely worried if it were different."
Mayberry said the rising numbers enable the area to compete for, and hold onto, better-paying jobs. And a more educated population makes better, more informed, community decisions, she said.
The Florida counties with the highest percentages of degrees are those containing the University of Florida and Florida State University. They are followed by counties containing some of Florida's wealthiest communities, such as Ponte Vedra, Naples and Palm Beach.
Among metropolitan counties, Hillsborough's number was slightly lower than the percentage of degree-holders in Orange County (containing Orlando), and higher than Miami-Dade, Broward, Pinellas and Duval counties.
Hillsborough may be holding on to educated, career-oriented people who might have left in past decades, said Tony Collins, vice president of Tampa's Tucker/Hall Inc., which advises corporations on communications, crisis management and strategic planning.
Jobs have evolved to the point where many successful people can work wherever they want, Collins said.
"We seem to be winning that quality-of-life, lifestyle battle more than we did before," he said.
Collins and Permuth attribute Hillsborough's rising numbers partly to the area's growing colleges, particularly USF and St. Petersburg College. They have made it easier for residents to stay in town and get degrees, he said.
But a bigger reason may be Tampa Bay's expanding economy, which is luring degree-holding people to the area, Permuth said.
"(J.P. Morgan) Chase relocated their whole New York facility to Tampa," said Gail Bernucca, a real estate agent who lives on Harbour Island and holds a master's degree in business from Boston University. "I moved a couple of their people into homes, and they were both well-educated."
But Permuth notes that two streams of people are flowing into Florida: the highly educated like Bernucca and her Chase clients, and thousands of uneducated laborers such as migrant farm workers.
In many impoverished families, teenagers are more attracted to an immediate job than to the later successes that a college education could bring, Permuth said.
"Florida is looking at a future in which the number of people in the poverty levels is going to dramatically increase," he said.
Statewide, Florida's percentage of degree-holders lagged 2 percentage points below the national average in the censuses of both 1990 and 2000.
In Hillsborough County, the five neighborhoods with the lowest percentages of bachelor's degrees consisted of three in urban Tampa and two in south Hillsborough's farm country.
Among the 10 most educated neighborhoods, a distinction emerges between northeast Hillsborough and south Tampa.
The top four neighborhoods for professional degrees, such as medical or law degrees, all are in south Tampa. But the top three neighborhoods for Ph.Ds are in Temple Terrace and Tampa Palms, near USF. In the newest quadrant of Tampa Palms, 9 percent of adults have Ph.Ds, easily the highest percentage in the county.
Neighborhoods that rose to the top rankings benefited both from high percentages of degree-holding residents and lower percentages of less-educated people. That favored master-planned developments where all housing is priced for middle- or upper-class buyers, such as New Tampa, Westchase and River Hills.
Bernucca, the real estate agent, estimated that the smallest condominium on Harbour Island costs $140,000. To afford that without a college education, she said, you would have to be a professional athlete, many of whom live on Harbour Island, or "an entrepreneurial type that just sort of has it."
-- Bill Coats can be reached at (813) 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com.
1. Leon 41.7%
2. Alachua 38.7%
3. St. Johns 33.1%
4. Seminole 31.0%
5. Collier 27.9%
6. Palm Beach 27.7%
7. Sarasota 27.4%
8. Martin 26.3%
9. Orange 26.1%
10. Monroe 25.5%
11. Hillsborough 25.1%
16. Pinellas 22.9%
24. Manatee 20.8%
39. Citrus 13.2%
40. Pasco 13.1%
43. Hernando 12.7%