Heartland Cities Emerge as Talent Hubs, Challenging Coastal Dominance

Overlooking “flyover country” could mean overlooking large pools of university graduates and skilled creatives whose numbers are rapidly growing and propelling cities and towns throughout the region to the nation’s highest ranks.            That is the opportunity presented in a new report, “Heartland of Talent 2025” prepared by Heartland Forward. The organization describes itself as “the nation’s only think-and-do tank dedicated to advancing economic success in the middle of the country.” The 20 states it defines as the heartland cover the vast distance south from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast and west from Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama to Texas and the states due north of it.            The report uses two criteria to analyze “the geography of talent” in America in the years 2019 to 2023. One is educational – the share of adults who are college graduates. The other is occupational – the share of the workforce employed in knowledge, professional and creative occupations. Creatives comprise a range of professionals including IT, architecture and engineering, business and management, legal, healthcare, education, the arts, entertainment and sports.            Until recently, graduates and knowledge workers “became massively clustered in coastal superstar cities and tech hubs,” the report said. “There is reason to believe that this geography may now be shifting at the margins as those superstar cities and tech hubs come up against their limits to growth.” The Covid pandemic helped spur this trend.

“Overall, our findings document an ongoing shift in the geography of talent, with heartland metros doing better on both measures,” the report stated.            The 170 metros in the states that make up “the heartland” are home to some 104 million people, or almost one-third of the U.S. population, and produce almost $7.5 trillion in GDP – about 28% of total U.S. economic output.