When you spend your life living and working in University towns, you begin to pick up on the similarities they all seem to share. If you live in a College town, you're going to get more parking tickets, meet more people who use the word "excellence" in conversation, and hear the bells of clock towers more often. And you'll usually find in each town what I facetiously call the "college professor ghetto" -- a neighborhood or area densely populated by University faculty and administrators. These enclaves of the highly educated always seem to stand out from the population at large, from the way they vote to the kinds of newspapers and magazines they read.

But if the detailed results from the 2000 Census are any guide, this concentration of the more highly educated among us is not limited to College towns. Indeed, the data show a wide disparity in the educational attainment both within and between the cities, counties and regions in Indiana. And given that our leaders have identified the need to attract and retain more educated workers as a primary goal in development of the state economy, this geographical pattern is something we ought to be aware of.

To begin with, it is clear from the data that the task of attracting more college-educated workers will be very difficult for the state's rural counties. All but one of the 15 Indiana counties with the highest proportion of adults with college degrees are part of a major city's Metropolitan Statistical Area. The only one that is not, Bartholomew County, contains a city that falls just short of meeting the criteria for that classification. On the other hand, only one of the lowest ranking 20 counties is linked economically to a major city.

When it comes to counting people with college degrees, the disparity between the have's and have-not's among Indiana counties is quite large. There are sixteen counties where less than 10 percent of the adult population has a college degree, whereas Hamilton County, the state's highest, has nearly 50 percent college graduates. Even more sobering is the fact that only four counties in the state, Hamilton, Monroe, Tippecanoe and Boone, have more people with college degrees than the U.S. average.

That's not altogether surprising. Urban areas are the only ones large enough to support the specialized services and industries that go hand-in-hand with a more highly trained workforce. But the causality works in the other direction as well. Whether it's because of the amenities, services, or due to the wider spectrum economic opportunities, it is clear that more highly educated Hoosiers prefer living in cities.

What is more, the sub-county data show that clustering of those with college degrees occurs within each city and region as well.

As documented in the Indiana Business Research Center's most recent Indiana Business Review, a small number of townships within each county typically house the lion's share of the more highly educated population. Given the similarities this subpopulation may have for such things as schools, taxes, and public services, this is also less than a complete surprise.

Those differences in educational attainment don't exist in a vacuum, of course. Given the close correspondence between occupational structure and education levels, they ultimately represent a shorthand method of describing the regional economies. Thus the counties with the highest proportion of workers in professional and management occupations have the highest number of college degreed individuals, while counties with fewer college graduates have higher proportions of their workforce in production-related occupations.

Indeed, the more you delve into the full detail of the Census portrayal of our state economy, the more you begin the question whether or not such a thing as an "Indiana" economy can even be said to exist. At the very least, the data tell us that what helps urban counties may prove to much less relevant for the rest of the state.