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KERA's One Crisis Away project focuses on North Texans living on the financial edge.

Dallas, Fort Worth And Other N. Texas Towns Ranked Some Of The Best To Start Career

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Does geography actually matter when it comes to getting that first job?

A new Wallethub study ranks the best and worst cities for starting a career, and Texas is all over the top 25. Analyst Jill Gonzalez breaks down the rankings with KERA's Courtney Collins.

Interview Highlights: Jill Gonzalez On...

…what researchers evaluated:  “We evaluated quite a lot of metrics, 17 in all. They fell into two distinct categories: professional opportunities-- the job opportunities available, the unemployment rate, the economic mobility and income growth rate. And then the quality of life, you know, this is starting a career, setting down roots, possibly even starting a family, so we looked at income, the strength of social ties, the housing affordability and the projected population growth.”

…what stands out about the Lone Star State: “Our study here definitely uncovered a lot of areas where Texas is booming. So first of all there’s huge corporations there, a lot of entry level jobs, and there’s room for those jobs to grow not only into that corporation, kind of get going up the ladder here, but also your income, your wages, are really having a likelihood to evolve as well, and as we all know, not every state can really boast that.  We’ve seen a lot of wage stagnation over the years, it’s finally slowly but surely increasing; it has been increasing in Texas for some time now.”

…how good starting salaries are in Houston and Dallas: “We’re just looking at the monthly starting salaries here and compared to many other places, very high. Dallas was fourth best, that’s looking at $3,300 monthly, Houston more like $3,700 monthly, number one in the country.”

Courtney Collins has been working as a broadcast journalist since graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2004. Before coming to KERA in 2011, Courtney worked as a reporter for NPR member station WAMU in Washington D.C. While there she covered daily news and reported for the station’s weekly news magazine, Metro Connection.