Wow, that's surprising!
See the interactive map here.
The second highest educated suburb are those (per the Brookings Institute) surrounding Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk. That would include our family.
This ranking is "educatonal attainment" which Brookings defines as:
"Rising educational attainment in the United States over time has contributed greatly to increases in our economic productivity and standard of living. This subject area profiles the educational status of adults (how much schooling they have completed and their enrollment in higher education), identifies differences by age and race/ethnicity, and reveals their relationship to the underlying economic features of American cities and regions."
Interesting.
As for individual cities, cities in my state rank for "educational attainment" as:
New Haven #9
Bridgeport and Stamford #29
Hartford #80
I linked to these sites from a lead article on Yahoo.
Actually this was an interesting exercise as I got to wondering what the difference between a "metro area" and a "city" is versus suburbs surrounding a city. I couldn't find the explanation in the data analysis notes either.
2 comments:
It may seem surprising that your nations Capitol ranked so high unless the rankings are based on individuals working in the city which in the case if DC would completely skew the results, especially depending on how they took their sampling.
Hi Ina,
It was based on residence, using US Census data. In the notes on the study they discussed minorities too. They seemed especially interested in the percentage of minorities living there and their level of education.
This is obviously influenced by work and careers. For example Fairfield County CT is a major living area for people who commute into Manhattan for finance jobs and other high paying jobs that require advanced college degrees, this affects Bridgeport also. The spill-over of residents who commute into Manhattan now extends beyond Fairfield County's coast up through New Haven County's coastline, up the train line, and the train is used to commute in the 90-120 minutes each way. There are also a lot of lawyers around here and other white collare jobs that require advanced degrees (accountants, etc.).
The fact that Yale University is in New Haven can boost their score as does the 2 hospitals, so you have a population of doctors, lawyers, and highly educated college professors living in New Haven. There are also other colleges in the immediate area that may have highly educated college professors living in New Haven.
I have lived in this area all my life and it's interested to see these statistics as I didn't think this area would rank so high. I thought the level of education was higher across the whole country, I guess I was wrong?
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