February 13, 2009 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Concentration of employment in higher education in metropolitan areas

In a comparison of 2006 data for the Nation and the country’s largest metropolitan areas, Boston has the highest industry concentration, or location quotient, of employment in private colleges and universities.

[Chart data—TXT]

The Boston area ranked first, with a location quotient of 3.63. The Boston area location quotient indicates that the concentration of employment in private colleges and universities in the Boston area was approximately three-and-a-half times as great as that of the U.S. as a whole.

No other major metropolitan area came close to matching the Boston area’s concentration of employment in higher education. The major metropolitan area that had the second-highest industry quotient of employment in colleges and universities was Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, with a concentration of about two-and-a-half times that of the nation.

Location quotient analysis is used here to quantify the concentration of employment in the "private colleges and universities" industry at the national, State, and metropolitan area levels. The national location quotient for an industry is always 1.0.

These data are from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. To learn more about higher education employment in the Boston area, see "The Prominence of Colleges and Universities in the Boston Metropolitan Area," (PDF) by Denis M. McSweeney and Walter J. Marshall, BLS Summary 09-01.