By The Numbers

The University at Albany has earned a reputation as the place to be for the country’s top demographers.

As a boy growing up in Northampton, Pa., William H. Frey wanted to be a cartoonist or a journalist.

"My parents said I should do something more useful, like become a doctor," said Frey, a sociology professor who is one of the newest members of the University's Center for Social and Demographic Analysis. As an undergraduate at Ursinus College, he settled on studying mathematics, but found the subject more meaningful when he could apply it to human problems. That led to a Ph.D. in sociology, with a specialty in demography, from Brown University in 1974.

Now, on the eve of the new millennium, Frey is exactly where he wants to be: in the catbird seat as he waits for the arrival of a mother lode of new census numbers for the country.

"This (year 2000) census will be a real and important benchmark which demographers will use to assess the status of the population of the U.S. and of the world," he said. "Here at the end of the millennium, life expectancy is longer than ever before. People are living into their 70s and 80s. If you look back over the past 100 or even 1,000 years, you will see there is more interracial mingling today than ever before, more interracial marriage around the world. Advances in transportation and communication have made the world a smaller place. The turn of the century is a time to sit back and see that the world's population is much different than it was before."

Helping policy makers and ordinary citizens alike make sense of that torrent of population statistics is the challenge for Frey and other researchers at the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, which has earned a reputation as the place to be for the country's top demographers. The University is the newest member of a small group of elite institutions with a Population Research Center Core Grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

According to center Director Stewart Tolnay, the productivity of researchers across the disciplines was a critical factor in Albany's winning the $2.5 million grant in 1997. The center, located in the Business Administration building on the uptown campus, acts as an administrative umbrella over the research of 37 University professors in 10 interdisciplinary fields.

"I came to the University at Albany because the center has a real opportunity to make its mark. There is a good nucleus of experts here to be a lightning rod for people interested in examining the results of the next census," said Frey, who joined the faculty last January after 17 years at the University of Michigan. The center's ability to attract Frey and Donald J. Hernandez, formerly of the U.S. Census Bureau, is evidence of Albany's growing clout in the field.

Recently, Frey examined the latest census estimates for New York State and found the state has some work to do in keeping its population. "New York State is losing domestic migrants-that is, people who were born in the U.S. "The main reason the state is gaining any population at all is because of immigration," he said.

Frey said the state must find a niche for growing high-tech industries, and make itself attractive to young people in order to stem the steady loss of population, especially from upstate New York. Upstate lost 25,000 people last year, according to U.S. Census estimates.

Still, Frey sees some hope. "Albany and Rochester are not doing badly," he said. The continuing hope for New York State is in an economy that is becoming more diversified, he said. "There is a relatively high level of education and a lot of infrastructure. It's just not growing the fastest."

Frey is also known for "The Diversity Myth," an article he published in American Demographics magazine in June 1998. While great influxes of international migrants entered the U.S. in the early 1990s, the latest population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show that only 21 counties in the U.S. qualify as truly racially diverse. This is because immigrants enter certain "gateway" communities-Los Angeles, Calif., for Mexican and Latin-American immigrants, and Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco for Asian immigrants-and tend to stay there.

African-Americans are also concentrating regionally by moving back to the South in large numbers. In contrast, white migration is more dispersed across the South and West.

U.S. census data is just one of the sources of information which the center's researchers tap. Sociology Professor John Logan is using other large sets of data to explore how Western influence has changed the traditional culture in China. He would rather be in China collecting data than writing a budget for a grant proposal, and the center has helped him do that.

"The center has made it easier to go through the process of applying for research grants," said Logan, whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. "Grant writing is still time consuming, but you are no longer administering the grant, buying computers, hiring students, and arranging a trip all alone. Computing support is very important."

Logan and Chris Smith, professor and chair of the Department of Geography and Planning and a professor of East Asian Studies, planned a major international conference in Shanghai in July on urban development in China. Smith is also a center faculty associate.

Both Smith and Logan are looking at internal movement in China and the impact on urbanization in social, political and cultural ways. This past summer Smith flew to the special autonomous region of Ningxia Hui in the far northwestern region of China to study the effects of government relocation of people from one part of the country to another.

Sociologist Nancy Denton, another center associate, is looking at voluntary relocations closer to home. With Emily Rosenbaum of Fordham University and University at Albany doctoral student Laura Harris, Denton recently oversaw a demographic project for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The goal was to see what happened to women with children who voluntarily moved out of public housing projects in Chicago. Other research teams looked at New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Baltimore.

The study was a follow-up to the Gautreaux court case, originally filed in 1966 against the Chicago Housing Authority, which charged that African-Americans were being forced to live in all-black public housing. As a result of that case, years later an effort was made to help some residents move out of the projects.

The 500 volunteers were divided into three groups: a third did not move; another third moved to the Section 8 housing of their choice; and the final third moved to a low-poverty census tract. Few short-term differences in satisfaction were found among those who moved.

"What we found was that just being out of public housing in Chicago is such an enormous plus that all those who moved were happy," Denton said.

The center frees researchers like Denton, Smith, Logan and Frey to do their best work, Director Tolnay said. Its existence is based on external, rather than state taxpayer funding.

"By acquiring external grants we're not only supporting research, we're creating jobs for graduate students," he said. "And through indirect costs we bring in 47 cents for every dollar of research support. That money goes directly to maintain University facilities and infrastructure. Every piece of equipment we buy belongs to the University at Albany Research Foundation. External funding is an efficient way of creating jobs."