Waiting For That Cold Omaha

Minnesota is a destination for the kind of people that keep an area prosperous:

"I knew I'd like this city," Hattie Dambroski said recently in her St. Paul apartment. "I didn't know I'd fall in love with it."

It sounds like an ad campaign. But it's just a soft-spoken biologist speaking on a sunny spring afternoon, slightly bemused by the attachment a native Cheesehead can begin to feel after just a few months in Minnesota.

Dambroski is just the kind of person the U.S. Census Bureau will have in mind today when it announces that Minnesota is now the No. 1 state in the nation in highest percentage of residents with a high school diploma, and has moved into the top 10 in its share of adults with college degrees.

The precise rankings are less important, said state demographer Tom Gillaspy, than the evidence that a "cold state at the end of the road" is still managing to attract the bright young minds that are key to a region's future prosperity...Midwest states know that's nothing to take for granted. Michigan has struggled, for instance, and so has Iowa, which drew nationwide headlines this winter for a proposal that would have offered young people tax incentives to live there.

Apparently they haven't heard that Governor Pawlenty's tax cuts have made this a "Cold Omaha", or that our mass-transit would shame Fargo.

Silly smart people.

Posted by Mitch at March 28, 2005 12:50 PM | TrackBack