Burgh Demographia

By Jim Russell

Today, Null Space points to an article in the New York Times about a different kind of brain drain. Pittsburgh is out in front of an aging population trend that is now a demographic crisis:

In Pittsburgh, public school enrollment plummeted from about 70,000 two decades ago to about 30,000 and continues shrinking by about 1,000 a year.

“At a certain point the school system becomes no longer viable,” said Grant Oliphant, the new president of the Pittsburgh Foundation, which is overseeing a program that provides college scholarships worth up to $40,000 for any student who has attended the city’s public schools since the ninth grade and graduates from high school with a grade point average of at least 2.0.

“The notion is to create an incentive to stay in school and graduate,” Mr. Oliphant said. “The second aspect is economic preservation — to create an incentive for people to keep their kids in school or move here with their kids — to keep enough taxpayers in town.”

Mr. Oliphant chooses unfortunate words to describe how the Pittsburgh Promise will address the shrinking population. The image is one of a city bleeding young residents. That was once the case and policies designed to retain people are still quite popular. But unless the Pittsburgh Promise can attract new residents, the program will fail.

I think the Promise should draw a number of families from the surrounding suburbs. That should help, but Pittsburgh's biggest demographic liability is the lack of immigrants from other countries. One solution would be to improve the ability of foreign nationals attending the University of Pittsburgh or Carnegie Mellon University to stay in the city. Until Pittsburgh puts the exodus of the 1980s behind it, the region will continue to struggle to make the transition to a postindustrial economy.