Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the costs of living in large cities keep rising, maybe the young will learn that the "educated, big city living" will just be a trap and wasted years for a lot of them, and will decide to for a life in their local areas instead? There's plenty of Univerisities in small, local cities as well, so it doesn't mean being condemned to becoming a chimney sweep as well.
That's very true but there are two problems: 1. Most young aren't so lucky to be born in a small developed city with good universities, jobs and high quality of life, so they can stick around their families, which is why they leave. Look at most of Southern and Eastern Europe. 2. For your idea to work we need to have companies also creating jobs in smaller cities, but the reverse is happening: most companies now excl…
I'm from Poland. In here, no matter where you're born, there's a city with an University within 100 km from you (and usually, it's much closer). A lot of those cities are smaller, affordable cities, with rents half that of Warsaw.
> 2. For your idea to work we need to have companies also creating jobs in smaller cities, but the reverse is happening: most companies now exclusively move to the biggest cities where the larges worker pools already are (Berlin, London, Amsterdam, etc) creating a snowball effect. Small cities also have jobs, but they tend to be terrible, body-shop style that suck to work for.
It's true if you're in tech or other highly advanced field, which tends to cluster workers in a few cities. However, most people don't work in such fields, so it's not a problem for them. I mean, if you want to work in tourism, or real estate or food production/processing, or medicine or law or architecture or countless other fields, the non-tier 1 cities have plenty of opportunities.