San Antonio Builds Its Brain Trust

Do you need to be smart to live in San Antonio? Well, no, but if you are, you’ll be in great company. It seems Alamo City has tied with New Orleans as the U.S. metro area with the biggest “brain gain,” according to a new study by Forbes magazine. Forbes studied metro areas with fast college graduation rates and found that San Antonio, with New Orleans, is gaining in the number of college students who graduate quickly and is collecting college educated people from elsewhere. San Antonio, had a net brain gain of  203 percent  ‒‒ that’s 76,000 college-educated people who’ve moved to town since 2007, or 20.3 percent

What makes this so important for San Antonio? Basically, the fact that brainpower gain is recognized as an indicator of economic momentum for the future. As more students graduate more quickly and stay In San Antonio to find work, the city’s economic engine builds. San Antonio has in the past few years shown major growth and appeal to younger workers looking to get in on the city’s burgeoning tech scene. Technology jobs with firms that contract with the city’s healthcare and military infrastructure ‒‒ the U.S. Air Force is a major client for the city’s tech businesses ‒‒have grown and are luring savvy workers to town or keeping the city’s bounty of high-tech college grads in place.

The largest local companies include Rackspace, Valero Energy, and Mission Solar Energy, which represent the fierce growth in the tech sector in San Antonio, represent some of these rapidly growing industry sectors. But beyond these companies, San Antonio is a growing epicenter of tech/healthcare entrepreneurism. More and more, those looking to run their own tech businesses ‒‒ particularly recent college grads who are finding the sector tough to break into with the most sought-after firms ‒‒ are settling in San Antonio and making their own gains with mega-clients like the U.S. Air Force.

Pretty smart, huh? But hey, we told you that you’d be in some pretty smart company in San Antonio.

Posted by Richard Soto on
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