Region continues to attract educated workers, but it can do more to keep them

As people come and go, the Inland Empire’s workforce changes in significant ways. Today I will describe the development of the IE workforce using American Community Survey (hereafter “ACS”) microdata. I have used IRS county-to-county migration data before and plan to do so in future posts too, but those statistics do not tell you anything about the people migrating; they just count the total number of people moving. ACS data can tell you much more about who the migrants are.

(By the way, click here and scroll down if you want to geek out a bit and see how these data are gathered. Replication files are available in Stata .do file format, but I also describe the process so that it can be implemented in other programming languages and statistical packages.)

I’m interested in the educational attainment of anyone coming or leaving the IE – whether to other parts of California or other parts of the U.S. Based on this framework, the region continues to attract migrants. Furthermore, my calculations show that on net, the IE is on track to gain, workers with a college or advanced/doctoral degree.

In 2019, the balance of migration in the IE led to an absorption of about 17,000 residents age 25 or older with less than a high school degree or only a high school degree. The balance of migration also led to a net gain of about 9,000 residents age 25 or older with a college or advanced degree (master’s, professional, doctorate).

In a later post I plan to discuss how house prices might be driving some outward movement. The net absorption of educated workers over the last six years is roughly constant (see chart below), so if policymakers want to retain them, housing policy is a good place to start.