On the other hand, two place where I have lived which are highly educated, are too small to be included, so it must be wrong. ?
4 Not bad, not bad at all! And my hometown made the top 100, frankly shocked by that.
I still do not see why Champaign/Urbana, IL, is not there. It is no smaller than Ann Arbor.
Also, if one decides that the entire Chicagoland should be considered as one unit, Ann Arbor should be considered as part of the extended Detroit area.
Seriously, I think that the analysis was manipulated so that certain towns and cities would look really good, while others were hidden. I mean, Boston doesn’t do so well, so you merge it with Cambridge and Newton - the two wealthiest towns in MA. To get the scores that they have for Boston area, they would have had to ignore all the much poorer Boston suburbs, like Malden. I mean, why even mention Newton, which is #12 by size of all Boston suburbs, while Cambridge is #6?
Another silly list which tell us nothing but that the people who created it have geographic biases.
Honestly, I don’t understand why Huntsville, Alabama, is not included. It is my understanding, which could be wrong, that it has more Ph.D.s per capita than any other city in the US.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/metro-micro/about.html defines how the MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas) are designated.
Whether or not you agree with how the MSAs are currently defined, Champaign / Urbana is too small to be in the top 150 by population, while Ann Arbor barely makes it in.
Huntsville is ranked #27.
The methodology for making the ranking is described on the web site with the ranking. Each of the following is given equal (20%) weight:
- % with high school diploma or higher
- % with some college or associates degree or higher
- % with bachelor's degree or higher
- % with graduate or professional degree
- various "Quality of Education & Attainment Gap" measures combined
@TigerInWinter I too was struck but the consistent criticism of educated people by the commenters on the Fox News site.
I am a former professor at an elite university who finds the enforced political orthodoxy on campus troubling. Nonetheless, I suspect that a vast portion of the innovation and economic growth that this country has experience in the last 30 years or so to have been generated through the efforts of highly educated folks in many of those hubs. I live in the Boston area, where the major industries are higher education, health care, pharma, biotech, tech, finance along with tourism and maritime trade. All of the former require education. I also co-founded a startup company in Silicon Valley, where tech is obviously an extraordinary part of the local economy. I know nerds. I was once one. One of my kids is one – has started a hot startup in the Bay Area – and my daughter moved to the Bay Area with her BF, a senior software engineer at one of the major tech firms. My son used to have regular board game weekends at our house with some very bright nerdy kids. One of them now has a PhD in math from Yale and another from Michigan. My daughter used to dismiss these guys as nerds with smelly shoes. Guess what. Her BF was one of them (an occasional member of the group). Nerds are often missing certain social skills, which may be part of what the unhappy Fox News commenters reflect.
However, I found the following article that looks at the divergence in the economies of blue and red states over time: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/09/10/america-has-two-economies-and-theyre-diverging-fast//. I think it is pretty clear that industries that employ highly educated people have been performing better. I suspect that at least some of the “educated does not mean smart” comments come from a sense of jealousy at the better prospects of the educated folks. Even if they can’t figure out how to tie their shoes, if they create new products or make algorithms more efficient, they will likely be financially more successful than their less educated peers whose shoes are neatly tied.
@shawbridge The USA has always had an uneasy relationship with smart people. Look haw many bad guys have been “evil geniuses” who were, somehow, beaten by brave but not that smart heroes, think about how smart people are almost always portrayed as evil, arrogant, ineffectual, weak, or useless. Look at how damaging having a graduate degree can be to the political chances of somebody.
While there have been short period during which being smart has been considered a good thing - the 1930s, the past 20 years or so, the attitude that smart people cannot be trusted is fairly deeply ingrained in the US culture. It is sometimes easy to forget that here on CC, where being good at school is considered a virtue, but that is still not all that widespread.
How many heroes in literature and popular culture have been truly smart, until recently? For every MacGyver, there are 30 A-Teams. It is Harry Potter who is always the hero, and Hermione Grainger is a supporting character.
In the past few years, it’s sometimes been hidden by claiming that the people who are very intelligent are not “really” smart. No, there is something called “street smarts” which is not related to the type of intelligence that allows somebody to be inventive of otherwise creative. So a person with “true intelligence” is somebody who can make a lot of money, or manipulate the system, etc.
That is why everybody thinks of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as “geniuses”, since they were able to monetize the inventions of other people. The people who are actually inventing the technology which these people are selling are ignored, and considered as being, somehow, of “lesser” intelligence.
Universities epitomize the type of intelligence which is scariest. These are not only people who are smart in the ways that make so many Americans uneasy, but they also disprove the tropes that are so dear to the American heart. They are creative, they are powerful, and some are rich, and, worst of all, they control the education of the youth of America.
America’s greatest achievement in higher education - importing brains on a scale never seen before, also plays into it, because it there is something that Americans fear more than intelligence, it is foreigners.
Baby boomers grew up on all the tropes related to academics, and internalized them more than any generation before or after. There are the conservative tropes that academics are “un-American”. There are the left-wing tropes that academics as cold and clinical and not only do not have compassion and humanity, but do not “understand nature”. The lefty also has the trope of creativity only existing in the arts, not in any academic field. There are apolitical tropes that academics are not actually working but living well on great salaries and simply spend their time engaging in wasteful pastimes of studying stuff which doesn’t matter. Then there is the trope of scientists “studying things that were never meant to be studied”. These tropes dominate books and movies from 1950s to the early 2000s, and still exist today, especially in popular media.
PS. Because I spoke about tropes: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/should
@MWolf, very thoughtful response. Loved the tropes and think your description/analysis seems to be on target. I live in a world where a) many of my friends are very smart (elite professors, high-end consultants, biotech execs, PE and Venture folks, etc.); b) people hire me because of ideas I created and because I am smart. I work with companies and occasionally governments around the world to work and in the non-COVID era, I would travel to them. But even clients in places like Wyoming and Houston are hiring my firm because we have developed a way of approaching problems that works. So I mostly experience a world that is hungry for my ideas. But, I think your characterization of the general skepticism and fear of intellectuals or intellectually active people fits.
@shawbridge All that being said, we are in a much better situation that the 1960s-1980s. Multiple representations of positive examples of scientists and engineers have definitely helped. Scientists and engineers can be heroes and the star of a story, and scientists are not always either evil or weak, side characters. The popularity of many movies about well know smart people, like The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, A Beautiful Mind, Hidden Figures, etc, also show a changing attitude.
But again, this also is generational. Millennials, Gen-Zs and Gen-X are the ones who are driving the interest in these movies, for the most part. For examples, there were many popular films about scientists and engineers until the mid 1950s, and then almost nothing until the 1990s, and there has recently been an explosion.
Still, the tropes still rule:
Well, this list has Trenton, NJ as #15 on the “most educated” list so I’m dubious about it. What they really mean is Princeton/Lawrenceville/West Windsor, Mercer County suburbs to the north of Trenton.
Basically it’s a list of college towns.
I’m surprised that the research triangle in NC is not highest up on the list, as it has the highest concentration of MDs and PhDs in the world.
@NJSue, Trenton would definitely not be high on the list. We are talking Trenton MSA.
Just looked at the methodology in the NerdWallet article. Each school is allocated points based upon various criteria, with a maximum of 100 points. Here are some of the major criteria:
Educational Attainment - Total Points: 80
Share of Adults Aged 25 Years & Older with a High School Diploma or Higher: Full Weight (~20.00 Points)
Share of Adults Aged 25 Years & Older with at Least Some College Experience or an Associate’s Degree or Higher: Full Weight (~20.00 Points)
Share of Adults Aged 25 Years & Older with a Bachelor’s Degree or Higher: Full Weight (~20.00 Points)
Share of Adults Aged 25 Years & Older with a Graduate or Professional Degree: Full Weight (~20.00 Points)
The first two give a near-automatic boost to university towns.
Trenton MSA gets 4.44 additional points because of university quality where it is first among the MSAs. Princeton diluted only slightly by a few small state schools probably does the trick. Interesting.
True, but I wouldn’t overplay that argument. First, note that by excluding people up to age 25, most students are excluded from this ranking. That still leaves university faculty, researchers, and administrators, who no doubt bring up the average level of educational attainment. But there are many big universities, some bigger than Michigan, in towns of equivalent size or in some cases much smaller. A couple of additional factors come to mind.
First, the University of Michigan has a relatively low student-faculty ratio, which substantially ups the percentage of people holding Ph.D.s or other advanced degrees.
Second, Ann Arbor isn’t just a college town; it’s also a major tech and engineering hub. EPA has a major research facility in Ann Arbor, and Google and many other tech- and engineering-oriented employers have a major presence there as well. These companies primarily employ people with at least bachelor’s degrees, and many with masters or Ph.D.s. In its employment profile, Ann Arbor is more like Palo Alto/Silicon Valley than Columbus, Lincoln, Tuscaloosa, or other more “typical” college towns.
“I still do not see why Champaign/Urbana, IL, is not there. It is no smaller than Ann Arbor.”
They used Metropolitan Statistical Area population. According to the U.S. Census, the Ann Arbor MSA has a population of 368,000. The Champaign/Urbana MSA has a population of 231,000. That makes Ann Arbor approximately 60% bigger than Champaign/Urbana.
“. . . if one decides that the entire Chicagoland should be considered as one unit, then Ann Arbor should be considered as part of the extended Detroit area.”
That’s just silly. The survey is based on MSAs as defined by the Census Bureau. The entire Chicago metropoitan area–city plus suburbs—is a single MSA, and for good reason. Detroit and Ann Arbor are not part of a single MSA; each has its own MSA based on their own distinct economies and employment, commuting, and residential patterns. It’s just an objective fact that the Chicago MSA is economically and socially one integrated unit, while Detroit + Ann Arbor are not a single integrated unit, not by any stretch.
Chicago and its suburbs operate as a unified whole. The suburbs are in part bedroom communities for people who work in the city, while others reverse commute, living in the city and working in the suburbs. The suburbs are also major employment centers in their own right, but they largely employ people in businesses and institutions that are themselves closely integrated with the economy and institutional fabric of the city.
Detroit and Ann Arbor simply don’t have that kind of close relationship. Relatively few people dommute between the two, though there are a handful. Detroit is still primarily a manufacturing center relying heavily on the auto industry, while Ann Arbor has more of a post-industrial knowledge-based economy that interacts with Detroit’s older manufacturing economy only tangentially. Some of the R&D that takes place in Ann Arbor benefits the auto industry, but in some ways Ann Arbor’s economy is more closely tied to Chicago than to Detroit.
Roughly half the University of Michigan’s undergraduates come from metro Detroit, which only makes sense because it’s by far the largest population center in the state, with about half the state’s population. But Michigan’s graduate students actually outnumer undergrads, and only a small fraction of themcome from metro Detroit. And far more Michigan alums end up in Chicago than in Detroit simply because their skills and talents are more in demand in Chicago’s more diversified and more knowledge-based economy. If we’re going to go beyond standard MSA boundaries as defined by the government, it might make more ense to conside Chicago and Ann Arbor as a single unit than Detroit and Ann Arbor.
“I think that the analysis was manipulated so that certain towns and cities would look really good, while others were hidden. . . . Boston doesn’t look so good, so you merge it with Newton and Cambridge - the two wealthiest towns in MA.”
Again, you seem not to understand how MSAs work. Newton and Cambirdge are part of the Boston MSA as defined by the Census Bureau. It wasn’t an arbitrary decision, much less any form of manipulation, for this survey to include Newton and cambridge in the Boston MSA. That was the Census Bureau’s decision, and it was made in the basis of objective criteria, not on a whim. Newton and Cambridge are oart id the Boston MSA because objective criteria tell us they’re closely integrated with Boston economically, socially, and institutionally. It would be arbitrary and manipulative to exclude them from the Boston MSA. That’s why the Census Bureau didn’t exclude, and following the densus Bureau’s lead, neither did this survey.
Madison, Wisconsin was # 6 on that list. Makes sense for it to be highly rated. Home of UW, state capitol and very little industrial type jobs.
Not a city.
^ Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill isn’t a city, but it is a MSA which appears to be the principal unit the authors used. I think the point is that it’s not the sheer number or concentration of MDs and JDs, but the average level of educational attainment. Parts of the Research Triangle are still part of the old industrial South, especially Durham which apart from Duke is basically a beat-up old industrial town with large numbers of less educated blue collar workers and retirees from those jobs. That brings down the average.
You would be wrong about that. Los Alamos, NM, reports that 18.7% of residents over age 25 have PhDs. That’s a higher percentage than Palo Alto or Chapel Hill.
And Los Alamos doesn’t have any universities that would influence the number of PhDs. It does have a National Laboratory. Los Alamos is a “company town”-- everyone works at the LANL or works in a business that supports LANL or the employees of LANL.