Last night as I was channel surfing between snaps of the Patriots-Jets bash in Foxboro, I was momentarily distracted when I reached one of the local, Tampa area stations. They had a graphic up and were talking about the "Smartest Cities" as determined by Portfolio dot com. Boulder, CO was number one, Ann Arbor, MI at two and Washington, DC was third. I can't say I found any of these all that surprising given the criteria Portfolio used:
Portfolio.com followed Census Bureau guidelines in designing an educational ladder. The following are the five rungs, with average annual earnings for all workers, both full-time and part-time, at each level (as of 2007) in parentheses:
* Advanced degree ($61,287), including professional, doctoral, or master's degree
* Bachelor's degree ($46,805)
* Associate degree or attended college without any degree ($32,874)
* High-school graduate ($26,894)
* High-school dropout ($19,405)
Portfolio has a pdf download available that lists the top 200 in case you're interested.
However, I would contest the declaration of Washington, DC as the "third smartest city" even though it probably does fit the description based on the stated criteria. Educated? Yes. Smartest? Not hardly.
