BRAIN DRAIN OR BRAIN BOTTLENECK?

For the last few weeks I've had the pleasure of working with a group, led by County Treasurer Jim Rokakis, that's looking into a possible county college loan initiative. Recently we asked NODIS, the local census gurus at Cleveland State, to run some crosstabulations on county residents' college enrollment by household income. Here's what we got back: According to the 2000 Census, among all 17 to 25-year-old county residents with high school diplomas or GEDs but no college degree, only 37% were currently enrolled in college.

Here are the percentages by household income range (local households only -- out-of-county residents living in dorms here are not included.)

I was astonished by these numbers, especially for the kids from upper-middle-income homes ($60,000+) who seem to be blowing off higher education by a 55%-45% margin. But my college-age kids were not surprised at all -- especially the Hathaway Brown graduate who left Kent State after a year and has recently been delivering pizzas to make her car payments while waiting to start a phone gig at Progressive. And Rokakis gave me a copy of an article from the November Atlantic Monthly (of which only the first few paragraphs are on line) containing this chilling factoid:

If you hope to obtain a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four, your chances are roughly one in two if you come from a family with an annual income over $90,000; roughly one in four if your family's income falls between $61,000 and $90,000; and slightly better than one in ten if it is between $35,000 and $61,000. For high schoolers whose families make less than $35,000 a year the chances are around one in seventeen.

Hmmmmm. Now I know that the Northeast Ohio Post-College Brain Drain has become an article of faith, if not dogma, for the keepers of our civic religion. And I'm really not looking to get heretical (again!) just for the sake of wearing those cool thumbscrews. But... is it possible, just possible, that our region's shortage of college graduates would be best addressed by getting lots more of our kids into and through college, rather than desperately attempting to hold onto a few more of those who've made it?

Is it possible that our real problem is not the Brain Drain after all, but a Brain Bottleneck somewhere between high school graduation and that next diploma?

Just wondering.