No well educated residents

[Silviu]

My "well educated" percentage hovers around 6% in a city with 35000 residents while the "highly educated" is over 35%. This results in nearly all commercial buildings being abandoned because they need well educated workers. Because of this I ended up pretty much ignoring commercial demand, although that's pretty much the ONLY demand that my city has ...

Now why does this happen? Traffic is not an issue (constantly over 85%) and high school capacity is more than enough. My guess is that I built a big university and they prefer going there instead of high schools? I thought that people would go to university only after high school graduation, but this does not seem to be the case. If people jump directly to high education, then building an university will make high schools pretty much useless.

Waiting also does not seem to help, no matter how much I wait the percentage does not go over 6%, and zoning more residential doesn't help either. This is the issue that I had ever since I started the city. I'm playing in sandbox mode (unlimited everything active as mods) so I did build a lot of stuff at once and I know this could cause some issues but they usually disappear after waiting a while.

Other active mods: TM:PE, move it!, find it!, network extensions 2, automatic bulldoze, extra landscaping tools. I don't use any population/education altering mods at all.

[kaitou1011]

People who are "highly educated" (went to college) are able to take jobs beneath their qualifications ("well-educated" and even "educated" and "uneducated"). They just take longer to decide to take those jobs after their graduation because no college graduate really wants to flip burgers, you know?

Education generally works as people who have only graduated grade school are "educated", people who've graduated grade school AND high school are "well-educated" and people who've done grade school AND high school AND uni are "highly educated", so it's not like they're picking college over high school. Citizens who attended no school and have just moved into your town aren't educated, so zoning new residential doesn't really help. You basically have to wait until you've had enough cims go through your school system before you can fill the jobs that require high school and/or college. Though public libraries can help people become higher educated as adults, do you have any of those around your city?

You should also check you have enough high schools, it may be a problem where you have more cims eligible for high school than you have spaces for them.

While I don't play with vanilla population anymore (I use Realistic Population), so this is an old anecdote, but in vanilla I remember the small retail buildings (like the 1x1 specifically) tended to have an inordinate amount of spaces that required higher education compared to the rest of the commercial buildings. Even though I don't play vanilla anymore, to this day I carry a habit of trying not to zone commercial in tight spaces because I would constantly have those buildings complain that there weren't enough educated workers even when I had a good school system. Is this problem you're having across all commercial buildings or is there a pattern?

IMO, you may have an issue of too many office jobs for your highly educated cims to chose from stopping them from taking a job beneath their qualifications. What college-educated person would flip burgers when there are office jobs available, after all! Or perhaps you've used a policy to get more highly educated positions in industry that they're preferring? Plus, doesn't high density commercial need more educated workers than low density? You could also try to fulfil your shopping needs with some low-density until you've got more students through your school system. Also check if your policy is currently set with "young adults prefer school" or "young adults prefer work". If your high school educated sims are immediately heading off to college, they're not entering the workforce right away. Which isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but turning it off might help you temporarily.

TL;DR: Your problem isn't coming from your 35% highly educated, it's more likely because of your 59% "educated" and "uneducated" population. These may have come from recently zoned residential or otherwise recently moved in citizens, or from your high schools being insufficient. As long as you keep your education system well-funded and well-balanced, it should go away over time. It really just sounds like most of your problem is that you're zoning too many skilled jobs before your city is ready.

[Silviu]

Right, so that confirms my suspicion that "highly educated" actually means "educated" + "well educated" + finished university, I thought that the game is somehow handling things differently and educated people go directly to university, but this does not make sense indeed.

As for public libraries, no I don't think I have a lot of these, I will place more. I am aware of the issue with very small commercial buildings and I avoid placing them aswell, they do seem to get abandoned way more often. For policies, I do have the education boost and prefer education set (city wide) and I suspected that might be part of the problem. I will try to turn them off at least temporarily and see if the problem goes away.

Now with high schools availability, that is not an issue, I have way way more capacity than eligible, I always tend to overbuild just to have enough available. Same thing with elementary schools.

So in conclusion, the problem seems to be a combination of a lot of uneducated/educated citizens (mainly from moving in) but also because of over-educating. So I will try to find a better balance and as you said stop zoning in offices for now (although I don't have a lot zoned in).

Thanks for the answer!