Metro-Area Brainpower Survey Released. And the Winner Is….

(This ought to start some discussion)…Boulder, Colorado:

“People in the rest of Colorado joke that Boulder is so different, it’s like it’s in a bubble,” laughs David Bolduc, owner of the Boulder Book Store. “And you know, in a way they’re right. Maybe we are in a bubble. We really are different from everyone else.”

Boulder residents, Bolduc says, tend to be more liberal. He also considers them to be more interested in natural foods, more passionate about political issues, more opinionated.

And, based on a new study by American City Business Journals, they’re smarter.

Boulder has more brainpower than any other metropolitan area, not only in Colorado, but in all of the United States, says an ACBJ analysis of 171 urban centers.

Fifty-nine percent of Boulder’s working-age adults have bachelor’s degrees, according to recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The survey used mostly 2003 Census data for each Metro area, and multiplied the percentage of the population with grad degrees by 5, bachelor’s degrees by 4, associate degrees by 3, “some college” by 2, high school grads by 1, and non-HS grads by zero.

As with any survey of this nature, it has its limitations. For example, Boulder was presumably able to include plagiarist first-class Ward Churchill and his unhinged academic defenders as grad-degreed persons.

The Top 10 are Boulder; Stamford, CT; San Francisco; Madison, WI; Metro Boston; San Jose; Raleigh-Durham; Ann Arbor, MI; Middlesex-Somerset-Hunterdon, NJ; and Metro Washington.

As to the bottom 10, five are in California, 3 are in Texas, and one each are in Florida and Louisiana (studiously avoiding commentary to avoid alienating readers).

An Excel spreadsheet with all 171 metro areas ranked is at the link above.

I’m still trying to get over the fact that Metro Dayton (102) came in ahead of Metro Cincinnati (111). My response: We have less brainpower, but we use what we have more effectively. So there. Oh, and Cincinnati was one of the few areas where 2003 data wasn’t used, so they had to use 2000 instead. Trust me, we’ve picked up a lot of brainpower since then.

Let the bragging and bashing begin.
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UPDATE: Generic Confusion makes a good point: “I would venture that a study like that is biased against states with older populations. The people retired in Florida now got the same education with a high school diploma that kids today go to college to receive. True or not, it was a lot easier to prosper without a college education back then.”

UPDATE 2: Betsy notes: “Of course, this equates college degrees with brainpower. The two are not necessarily correlated. As we see all the time listening to some of the lame brains pontificating on politics.”