Cities that are smarter than thou (or at least better educated)

[Pedestrian]

Kyle Walker, an assistant professor of geography at Texas Christian University, has created an interactive dot map visualizing US neighborhoods by educational attainment.
Each dot represents between 25-500 people over the age of 25, and each is color-coded based on how far those people have gone in school. Blue dots are graduate degrees, green are bachelor's, yellow are some college, orange are high school, and red is everything short of high school.
Across the Bay Area, San Francisco is made up largely of graduate degrees — except for a pocket of red in Chinatown. Similar to San Francisco, other west coast cities like Seattle are primarily made up of residents with graduate or bachelor's degrees . . . .
people with less education tend to live in the outer boroughs around Manhattan . . . .

SF Bay Area


SF city


Silicon Valley


Portland


Puget Sound area

http://www.sfgate.com/business/artic...d-11094965.php

Click on link to original maps for more cities like New York, LA, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Atlanta etc.

[CherryCreek]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

http://www.sfgate.com/business/artic...d-11094965.php

Click on link to original maps for more cities like New York, LA, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Atlanta etc.

Obviously, educational attainment while perhaps not a measure of who is smarter than thou, IS a really good proxy for both wealth of individuals and the relative economic health of the cities.

Looking at the maps for cities such as Chicago (http://personal.tcu.edu/kylewalker/m....9385/-87.7191), St. Louis (http://personal.tcu.edu/kylewalker/m....7291/-90.3177), Denver (http://personal.tcu.edu/kylewalker/m...5980/-104.9348), Dallas ( http://personal.tcu.edu/kylewalker/m....9081/-96.8808), Houston (http://personal.tcu.edu/kylewalker/m....0434/-95.5540) and others, the maps really capture some of the current demographic trends with thriving pockets in some core cities, surrounded by declining "inner ring" suburbs and then "outer ring" burbs again with higher educational achievement (and no doubt wealth).

Would be interesting to see the evolution over the last 10 years and then tracking into the future.

[photoLith]

Wish we could see these maps in other cities other than just West Coast.

[SlidellWx]

Love these maps.

Looked at Baton Rouge and it shows the north-south divide of the city. South Baton Rouge not only has higher educational attainment, but it is also correlated well with higher median household income for the area.

Overall breakdown when zoomed in on Baton Rouge is:

13% less than HS education
31% HS graduate
28% Some college
19% Bachelor's Degree
9% Graduate Degree

Also explored New Orleans, and it shows the same correlation between household income and education attainment. There is no true divide for New Orleans as high income and low income neighborhoods are interspersed throughout the metro area. Lakeview area, Uptown area, Bywater/Marigny area, Old Metairie area, and Mandeville stand out as pockets of higher educational attainment.

Overall breakdown when zoomed in on New Orleans is:

15% less than HS education
30% HS graduate
29% Some college
17% Bachelor's Degree
9% Graduate Degree

[dave8721]

Originally Posted by photoLith

Wish we could see these maps in other cities other than just West Coast.

You can zoom out and pan the map wherever you want.

link to actual map:
http://personal.tcu.edu/kylewalker/m....8214/-84.3801

[Ant131531]

The city of Atlanta, If I recall is around 50% bachelor's degree or higher. The metro is around 35% or so.

[The North One]

Originally Posted by photoLith

Wish we could see these maps in other cities other than just West Coast.

Map shows the entire country, click on the link.

I wish it showed Canadian cities though.

[Docere]

Doesn't Seattle have the highest percentage of college graduates of US major cities? San Francisco, DC and Boston are obviously up there as well.

[CherryCreek]

Originally Posted by Docere

Doesn't Seattle have the highest percentage of college graduates of US major cities? San Francisco, DC and Boston are obviously up there as well.

Per this link (https://www.luminafoundation.org/new...on-2016?home=1), the following 2014 data is given:

Metro-Area Highlights

Of the 25 most populous metropolitan regions in the continental U.S., the top 10 metros ranked by degree attainment are:

Washington D.C./Arlington-Alexandria, Va.—55.7%
Boston-Cambridge-Newton, Mass.—55.1%
San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, Calif.—54.0%
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, Minn.—52.0%
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash.—49.5 %
Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, Colo.—49.0 %
New York, N.Y./Newark-Jersey City, N.J.—47.0%
Pittsburgh, Pa.—46.1%
Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, Md.—46.0%
San Diego-Carlsbad, Calif.—45.3%

The top 5 state numbers are as follows:

Massachusetts—55.4%
Colorado—54.2%
Connecticut—53.2%
Minnesota—52.9%
Washington—51.6%

[pdxtex]

Originally Posted by Ant131531

The city of Atlanta, If I recall is around 50% bachelor's degree or higher. The metro is around 35% or so.

g%d damn...how do people find jobs down there? the competition must be nuts....is there a huge entrepreneur environment also?

[tdawg]

Atlanta comes in right behind San Francisco in percentage of residents with at least a Bachelors at 48%. Atlanta isn't typically thought of as a "college town" despite being home to Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State (among many other smaller colleges) and home to ~250,000 students metro-wide (7th in the nation).

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/stud...p-cities-2015/

[JManc]

Atlanta is also fairly small compared to it's metro; 450,000/ 5,000,000 and the wealthy/ highly educated tend to live closest in town...which is Atlanta proper.

[cabasse]

it's still a fairly well educated metro area as well though:

https://wallethub.com/edu/most-and-l...d-cities/6656/

its peers being portland, san diego, denver, chicago, sacramento.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by tdawg

Atlanta comes in right behind San Francisco in percentage of residents with at least a Bachelors at 48%. Atlanta isn't typically thought of as a "college town" despite being home to Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State (among many other smaller colleges) and home to ~250,000 students metro-wide (7th in the nation).

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/stud...p-cities-2015/

"San Francisco" is actually "San Francisco/Oakland/Hayward" and as the map clearly shows, the latter two drag down the overall average educational achievement vs SF city proper. Not sure if there are similar phenomena vis a vis Atlanta or if its suburbs or satellite cities actually raise the metro average.

[mhays]

The cities often called "elite" probably correlate more with graduate degrees more than with bachelors degrees. Having a ton of BAs could reflect a lot of back-office employment. The graduate degrees will often be around scientific, tech, finance, education, and other fields.

I have a couple years of community college, sorta, so this isn't about me.