Metro areas suffering from brain drain or benefiting from brain concentration

There are more restaurants per person here than NYC; the traffic is never bad except during 30-minute rush hour intervals; there is enough middle/upper-middle income here to support high-end retail and services (ex: even if there is only one very good spa and steakhouse, it is still a very good spa and steakhouse); the cost of living is...well it's ok. Housing is expensive in the City and the surrounding Town, but if you go a mere 5 minutes out of the Town of Ithaca in any direction you practically pay peanuts. Still, food and other necessities are Upstate-cheap if you don't shop at Wegmans.

But most importantly, Ithaca is a pleasant place filled with pleasant people. The average person on the street is friendly and helpful. Nobody is "too important." Maybe it's because we have a top public high school where rich and poor alike receive a quality education, but there isn't an economic "us vs them" one often finds in decrepit Rust Belt cities with wealthy suburbs or revitalized metro areas that sag professionals with "gentrifier guilt."

The point I'm trying to make is that if you want professionals (and thereby, businesses) to come and stay, you have to make your city a nice place to live. Tax breaks don't fix a lousy commute. Fancy new mixed-use high-rises don't diminish the sneers you get from service workers who see you as a disruptive yuppie who is destroying their hometown without even realizing it.

I know it's not terribly helpful to suggest "if you want to make your city attractive to professionals, it just has to have that spark," but I see it as akin to a doctor recommending the extremely difficult tasks of regular exercise and a healthy diet instead solving every problem with a pill.

Besides the Los Alamos connection, there is a research institute that studies complexity in the county itself, and three private liberal arts colleges.

People also like to move here for the culture alone. Last I checked the arts economy is somewhere in the top 5 in the country. Combined with the well-forested mountains, cooler weather, and a history that predates European exploration of the Americas (roughly where the central plaza currently stands was an old Pueblo village built in 900 AD), it makes for an interesting place.

Not that I'm particularly trying to convince anyone to move there. Downside of its long history is that the awkward road network is less a result of smart urban planning and more the fact that they were old stagecoach routes that became legitimized by sheer virtue of being old. Also, you likely won't have any choice but to live in a house made out of adobe (dried mud), because tourism, which might be why the housing market there is relatively crazy compared to the rest of poor old New Mexico.

In case you're wondering, I live 50 miles south in Albuquerque and once briefly lived in Santa Fe before the high rent got to me.

Their definition seems a bit strange, however. I understand "brain drain" as a different phenomenon from the lack of a highly-educated workforce, and their study does not account for movement of people, which analyses of brain drain typically do. This just seems like certain metros are lacking highly educated workers, which should be expected as particular employers decline or relocate.

Oh, right, and it has a Big Ten university in it noncoincidentally.

I'm surprised these shitty / declining areas don't take advantage of the incredibly expensive college in other areas by setting up new colleges in their areas and subsidizing the tuition, and investing in them to make them great.

Granted that takes a while to accomplish, but the positive feedback of major schools is undeniable... and it ain't just the football team.

UK: Twenty thousand people isn't even a town here, let alone a city. Am I being harsh in suggesting that this is basically rounding error? Isn't the dynamic towards urban (N*10^6 people with 1 < N < 10) concentration?