My High School Reunion and the Creative Class

This weekend I attended my high school reunion. I shant say which one, but suffice it to say, Michael Jackson videos were being played (and it was the Michael before the plastic surgery.)

I won’t bore you with all of the exciting details. Two of my classmates, and fellow bloggers, CTK and Ubermilf, have posted nice recaps of all of the shenanigans so you can check them out there.

Our high school was a large public suburban high school in the western suburbs of Chicago with a class size of 683 students. For some reason, we had quite a few honors type students in our class. The high school actually had to add more honors and AP courses to handle all of us.

One of our classmates was named to the first USA-Today All Academic Team. Another classmate, and, actually, my prom date (claim to fame points!), had a perfect on the SAT, one of only 9 students in the country to have a perfect score that year. And they were NOT the same person.

We had talented musicians, actors, and writers.

Like any high school we had various cliques, like the brains, the popular girls, the jocks, the burn-outs, and the band geeks. Sometimes, you could overlap in several categories (be both a brain AND a band geek, for instance.) I was one of those- both a brain and a band geek. There. I admit it.

What I noticed this weekend was that those “brains”- as I’ll call them- turned out to be what is now termed by Richard Florida as the “Creative Class”. I’ve talked about the Creative Class before and how they will shape the future of our cities. Every city is desperately trying to position itself to attract these creative type of workers. Wikipedia describes the Creative Class as:

The Creative Class describes 40 million workers - 30% of the U.S. workforce - and includes of two segments of workers:

Creative Professionals - These professionals are the classic knowledge-based workers and include those working in healthcare, business and finance, the legal sector, and education.

Super-Creative Core - These workers include scientists, engineers, technies, innovators, and researchers, as well as artists, designers, writers and musicians.

It begs the question then: where did the “brains” from our class, aka the creative class, wander to?

From a non-scientific survey based on word of mouth and the info the reunion committee provided it seems like quite a few from the class got an advanced degree. Most of those, but not all, were in the “brains” group while in high school (not surprising- some kind of destiny fulfillment thing.)

Number of PHDs: 7
Number of MAs: 11
Number of MBAs: 7
Number of JDs: 8
Number of MDs: 3

The number one city for the brains to reside is still Chicago and the Chicagoland area. About 10 of the brains still lived in the Chicago area. But out of those ten, several had wandered to other cities, including New York, San Francisco and Paris, since high school, to work and then had moved back to Chicago at a later time.

Not surprisingly, a good number of people were in the cities that are adapt at attracting the Creative Class types such as San Francisco (3 are there now, including perfect SAT score classmate, and several others have lived there in the past), Seattle (2 are there), New York City (3), Washington DC (2), Boston (2), and Los Angeles (2).

This is, as I said, completely unscientific. This only represents about half of the “brain” group. I don’t know where the other half of the “brain” group is at the moment. But based on those I talked to- it gives you a good idea.

Not a single one was in a city like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, or Philadelphia- all cities that have struggled to attract the creative class.

Our USA-Today All Academic Team star (one of only 20 from around the nation that year) is in Australia trying to find a cure for Parkinsons. Fitting. And again, he symbolizes the global quest for talent that sets the Creative Class apart. Our valedictorian is trying to cure cancer in Houston. There are a smattering in small town America, mainly working as professors at universities.

Chicago, then, has done a decent job in keeping some of its Creative Class talent. We are reaching our peak earnings years. Will it keep us into the future?