The Most And Least Brainy Cities In America

Do you live in a college town? Take a look around -- chances are it's one of the brainiest cities in America.

Portfolio Magazine recently ranked 200 American cities in order of relative brainpower. Using new American Community Survey data, it looked at cities' average adult earning power and median level of educational attainment to determine which towns had the most cerebral force.

Ranking among the brainiest cities are Boulder, Colo., home of the University of Colorado; Ann Arbor, Mich., home of the University of Michigan; Washington, D.C., which has several colleges and universities; Durham, N.C., where Duke University is located, and Fort Collins, Colo., home to Colorado State. (See the rest of the brainiest cities here.)

The five least brainy cities are concentrated west of the Mississippi. They include Merced, Calif., McAllen-Edinburg, Tex., Brownsville, Tex., Visalia, Calif. and Bakersfield, Calif. (If you can bear to look, find the least brainy cities here.)

Porfolio's survey focused on the 200 largest metro areas in America, the largest being New York City and the smallest Burlington, Vt.

Earlier this year, the Brookings Institute found that Washington, D.C. was America's most-educated metro area and Scranton, Penn. was the least-educated.

In terms of which cities have the most degrees, however, San Francisco emerges as the unmatched winner. According to blogger Rob Pitingolo, the city by the bay has more than 7,000 degrees per square mile.

Comments

[M-green-T]

03:30 AM on 01/06/2011

Los Alamos New Mexico should be on the list.

[Chuck Dick]

06:48 PM on 12/18/2010

San Francisco is a 49-square-mile city. It's very small. That's pretty impressive. No wonder every web company is there, or nearby. Twitter, Google, Apple, Oracle, Sun, Webvan, etc.

[hiyas]

11:31 AM on 12/05/2010

these surveys are regularly such a joke. folks in boulder and colorado like to toute how "well educated" the population is, yet, since when does having a college degree mean someone did much more than party a lot for 4 or 5 years on mom and dad's dime or knows much beyond a tiny sliver of the world they pa any attention to? you can meet many a PhD, even, that might certainly be able to muscle through the degree by jumping through all the right hoops without really having much quicker wit or insight than a high school dropout. literally. if the survey was of IQ (across many dimensions - including athletic, musical or artistic, emotional, analytical, verbal, quantitative, social, cultural, etc), some of these places - probably even the top spot - might fall well down the list.

[John Heess]

09:55 AM on 12/05/2010

Bakersfield may be one of the "Least Brainy Cities", however, this city seems to be immune to the economic woes of the rest of the country. The people that reside in Bakersfield are hardworking, average Americans that would give you the shirt off their back.

[brijo731]

07:10 PM on 12/29/2010

They are closed minded bigots

[brijo731]

09:23 PM on 12/29/2010

Religious nuts

[Hamzah Khan]

05:57 PM on 12/04/2010

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/183792/more_than_onethird_of_washington_dc.html

interesting...

[Tashenka]

06:21 PM on 12/03/2010

It's the Brookings Institution, not the Brookings Institute.

[jessicajuliette]

08:17 PM on 01/11/2011

it can has and been referred to as both..both are correct

[eljefefx]

01:40 PM on 12/03/2010

No surprise about the two in Texas, especially Brownsville. Anyone wondering why I say this need only look at a map.