The Dallas-Fort Worth area made the first cut in the HQ2 sweepstakes, but when Amazon comes around for a much closer look, how about focusing on the Dallas side of the region?

In the seven-county metro division known as Dallas-Plano-Irving, Amazon will find more college-educated millennials, a deeper mix of business professionals and managers, and higher incomes.

While the six-county Fort Worth-Arlington metro has real strengths in manufacturing and transportation, the knowledge workers that Amazon covets are much more plentiful on the eastern side.

The differences in the two workforces and economies usually don’t get much attention and there's been a successful, complementary relationship through the years. The North Texas region has boomed, in part, because the Dallas side excels in attracting corporate and regional headquarters and tech companies. And Fort Worth-Arlington has been a magnet for huge investments from manufacturers like General Motors, Lockheed Martin and General Electric.

But Amazon’s public search for a second headquarters has put a brighter spotlight on D-FW, making it worthwhile to dig deeper into the traits of both sides.

Amazon plans to invest over $5 billion in HQ2 and eventually create up to 50,000 high-paying jobs. Amazon is seeking a long list of attributes in its host city, from bike lanes and connectivity to cultural fit and recreational opportunities.

Among the top priorities is a place with talent — both homegrown and recruited from beyond the region.

“A highly educated labor pool is critical,” Amazon said in its request for proposals.

It’s on this score that Dallas might want to stand alone, because Fort Worth is draggin’ it down.

This month, a report revealed which cities had the most college-educated millennials and how they compared in the Amazon contest. Dallas-Fort Worth ranked 47th among the top 100 metros nationwide. But among the Amazon finalists, D-FW ranked next to last.

"The cream of the millennial crop is not evenly spread across the landscape," wrote demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution.

That’s true in North Texas. In Dallas-Plano-Irving, over 38 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds have a bachelor’s degree or higher. In Fort Worth-Arlington, just over 29 percent of millennials have a college degree.

How significant is that gap? If the divisions were ranked separately, Dallas-Plano-Irving would be No. 32 on Frey’s list of 100, and Fort Worth-Arlington would be 77th.

Leaders in Fort Worth are aware of this shortcoming and, to their credit, have launched an effort to address it. In December, officials from the city and chamber of commerce released detailed reports on the Fort Worth economy, and they warned about the risk of Fort Worth becoming a suburb of Dallas.

“We have a talent problem,” declared the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce in its new strategic plan.

The chamber deserves kudos for such candor, but let’s hope Amazon doesn’t think that its assessment applies to Dallas-Plano-Irving.

The Dallas side of the metro has a significant edge in the share of total population with a bachelor’s degree, which is even greater among millennials. A larger college-educated workforce leads to faster growth in high-skilled jobs and higher pay.

On the Dallas side, jobs that required at least a bachelor's degree increased by 21 percent from 2010 to 2016. On the Fort Worth side, those jobs grew only 12 percent over the same period, according to Fort Worth's recent study.

Fort Worth had above-average growth in middle-skill positions, such as plumbers, electricians and production workers. But it “lags the region, state and nation in high skills employment growth,” the city said.

“Growth in sectors filled with high-wage professional jobs has taken place almost exclusively on the Dallas side of the metro area,” the city report said.

The Fort Worth chamber has set ambitious goals to close the gap. Over the next four years, it wants to recruit the corporate headquarters of four Fortune 1000 companies and increase its share of college-educated workers by 5 percentage points.

“This is not about the Amazon project,” said Brandom Gengelbach, who leads economic development for the Fort Worth chamber. “It’s about making the Fort Worth area more prosperous for those who are here and those who’ll be moving here in the future.”

In Dallas-Plano-Irving, the average annual pay for all jobs is almost 12 percent higher than in Fort Worth-Arlington, equating to an extra $5,370, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those differences are greater for select fields, including lawyers, managers, engineers and programmers.

On the Dallas side, over 19 percent of the workforce is employed in business and professional services, a sector that includes many white-collar, high-paying jobs. In Fort Worth, just 11 percent of workers are in that sector.

Pay for some specialties, such as machinists and transportation supervisors, are higher on the Fort Worth side. That may be due to a higher concentration of workers in manufacturing and trade, transportation and utilities.

Next month, Fort Worth officials plan to hold court at South by Southwest, the popular annual festival in Austin. They’re bringing local musicians to a Fort Worth house. They’re also planning a panel discussion on the Uber Elevate project and inviting officials from Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin, Gengelbach said.

“We want to show that Fort Worth is a fun, attractive, creative place for millennials,” he said. “We’re not marketing ourselves as much as we need to.”