The smartest city in America is Minneapolis apparently. Don’t take my word for it, I’m obviously biased. Men’s Health Magazine did a study using college degrees per capita, SAT scores, and lots of other stuff as data. Here’s a link to the article, and also the top ten list, though in the acticle there are 101 cities listed.
But…
I have some problems with the rating criteria from the website:
“We based our rankings on the number of bachelor’s degrees per capita, the number of universities, inhabitants’ SAT scores, state creativity scores as assessed by Catalytix and the Richard Florida Creativity Group, and the number of Nobel Prize winners for physics and medicine born within the towns’ borders”
I don’t know about where you live, but since I work for a international company, I’d say that there’s many more here that grew up and got their degrees elsewhere. And when you start getting into the PhD or engineer levels, they almost never come from the local universities. On those SAT scores - again, many leave town once they get to college and never return, those that are here took SAT’s elsewhere. So I’m not sure what they are rating???
I also realize that IQ numbers can be subjective, so the whole idea of rating based on scores, degrees, etc. must be speculative.
I kind have figured it wouldn’t be Cincinnati, they probably gave the test to our city council. (Cincinnati Insider Joke)
IQ tests: There are people who do well at taking tests and are dumber the rocks in the real world. IQ tests tell only how good you are at taking tests.
Albert Einstein failed his entrance exams, was told by a math teacher that he would never amount to anything.
Kind of sad though, sort of, that he got hung up on trying to formulate a theory of everything without being able to accept quantum mechanics…and thus spent the majority of his life (post relativity) not finding what he wanted to find.
Regarding Washington, since the rating criteria include some state statistics, it’s on an unlevel playing field, since it has no state. The DC suburbs include some counties that have among the highest proportion of people holding doctorates in the nation (Fairfax, VA, and Montgomery, MD, both with about 1/3 of the adults with doctorates).
Regarding Einstein, there’s still stuff he did that’s being verified experimentally, and his work on the “theory of everything” laid the foundations for the work on superstring theory that’s being done today – the fact that he didn’t get it all done 50 years ago doesn’t mean it was a waste of time. I know it’s fashionable to say he was overrated and to say he was unproductive in his later life, but in a way, he was one of the most underrated physicists of the 20th century. He deserved at least two Nobel Prizes that he didn’t get, possibly three (general relativity, should’ve shared one for special relativity, and his work in thermodynamics/statistical mechanics that’s gotten experimentalists two Nobel Prizes in the last 8 years), although the one he did receive was not deserved (his theory of the photoelectric effect turned out not to be correct).
YIPPEE. Somebody did a study! Hey kids, grab the Kodak! Load up the truck, we’re movin to the Twin Cities.
One word: bologna. (Not to be misaken for Lasagna)
I did a study too. I discovered that Americans don’t like sausage pizza. I conducted a detailed, scientific poll of three of my co-workers and they all dislike sausage. Maybe I can get a million dollar grant for my next study.
They might as well have just stacked them up according to average socio-economic status. Who does and doesn’t go to college has less to do with brains than with money.
