The share of downtown residents with a college degree rose threefold between 1980 and 2017, from 15 to 45 percent

From Neighborhood Change, Gentrification, and the Urbanization of College Graduates by Victor Couture and Jessie Handbury.  From the Abstract:

We study changing trends in within-city sorting by education over the last 40 years. We show that neighborhoods closest to the centers of large US cities rose from having the lowest levels of college attainment in 1980 to the highest in 2017. We discuss the determinants of changes in sorting patterns, focusing on the role of transportation technology and income growth. We outline various consequences of the recent urbanization of college graduates on neighborhood amenities, house prices, and segregation. We highlight the tendency of college graduates to cluster into select central neighborhoods, likely limiting opportunities for interactions across educational lines.

More specifically.  

There has been a striking reversal in where college graduates choose to live within the largest US cities. For most of the twentieth century, Americans who could afford it moved to the suburbs. At some point after 1980, college graduates started moving back downtown. This urban revival intensified at the turn of the twenty-first century, even as the suburbanization of the US population as a whole continued unabated. Accelerating inflows of college graduates transformed downtown neighborhoods in almost all large US cities, raising policy concerns over housing affordability in gentrifying areas. The share of downtown residents with a college degree rose threefold between 1980 and 2017, from 15 to 45 percent, and downtown areas reverted from being the least-educated to being the most-educated areas of US cities. This gentrification of the United States’s downtown areas had a strong age and racial bias. Over the last few decades, college graduates who are young and white experienced much larger changes in their propensity to live downtown than any other demographic group. Now, in the post-pandemic era, there are early signs of renewed suburban attractiveness and there may be yet another reversal in college graduates’ location choices.

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The gentrification of US downtowns had important welfare consequences. When higher-income people move to a neighborhood, its local amenities adjust to match their tastes and budgets. Improving schools and local services make those neighborhoods even more attractive to higher-income people, thus amplifying neighborhood change. Because the rich can outbid the poor for housing in neighborhoods that become more desirable, and because new housing is often difficult to build in landconstrained downtowns, rapidly rising housing costs further exacerbate the welfare impact of downtown gentrification.  Indeed, rising house prices are a controversial by-product of neighborhood gentrification. Cities across the country responded by implementing a variety of policies to maintain housing affordability in gentrifying neighborhoods, from rent control to various incentives to build affordable housing. These antigentrification policies have generally seen only modest success.