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Smartest (and Dumbest) College Towns
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With college bowl season kicking off last night, The Daily Beast crunched the numbers to determine a more prestigious champion: the smartest college town in America. Where does yours rank?
Charlottesville, Cambridge, Chapel Hill… the very idea of a college town conjures everything good and right about American brainpower. The best and brightest young minds learning from the wisest, in small cities where the No. 1 product is knowledge.
But just as the next few weeks will use football to teach an important lesson—only one team can ultimately win, though many can play with honor—we thought we’d try to quantify which of America’s college towns is in fact the smartest.
Click the Image to View Our Gallery of America's Smartest (and Dumbest) College Towns
“The relationship is not without tension, but both realize that they are bound together,” says Ann Arbor City Council member Christopher Taylor, who holds four degrees from the University of Michigan.
So the first question for this exercise: What is a college town? For us, it’s a place where the college or colleges define the community. Thus, cities like Austin and Columbus and Boston, which are well-known college hosts, but also large economic and political capitals, don’t make the cut. On the reverse end, we avoided extremely small towns like Hanover, New Hampshire, and Oxford, Mississippi, where the entire village feels like an extended campus. Too much gown, not enough town. Our population minimum: 25,000, using 2008 Census data.
After choosing 25 well-known college towns that meet our benchmarks, we ranked them, using four criteria.
- Bachelor’s degrees per capita for the over-25 population: this measured the relative education of permanent residents.
- Graduate degrees per capita for the over-25 population: similar to above, but more stratified.
- Median SAT score for the town’s student population.
- Voter turnout in the 2008 election: political engagement, whether left or right, has repeatedly correlated with higher intelligence; our one criteria that measures behavior, rather than achievement.
Each category was ranked and weighted equally, with more points given for the best and fewer points for the worst, and then tallied. The result is a ranking of 25 that has nothing to do with basketball or football. Just like college, while all of these towns are among the elite, we also handed out grades. And as with your strict history professor, we did so on a curve: the top 20 percent got As, the next 40 percent got Bs, the following 20 percent got Cs, and then the bottom fifth got Ds, with the exception of the very last town, which got an F.
So who is the smartest of the smart? And who needs to hit the books? Click here for the exclusive rankings.
Clark Merrefield was the chief researcher for this ranking.
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tyroner
For your East Lansing picture I think someone has it wrong. I live here and let me assure you being in the middle of the state there are no lighthouses....
cre8ivk8
It's not a lighthouse... The picture is of Beaumont Tower... located near West Cirle Dr. on MSU's campus.
tyroner
They changed it - when the article first went up it was a picture of a lighthouse on the ocean - clearly not Beaumont which is 5 mins from my office!
princeminski
how do you read this?
TheWiseBard
Cornell's major medical facilities are in NYC, not in Ithaca.
You are docked two grade levels for so egregious an error...although letter grading this enterprise seems totally inapposite.
CountRaoul
Sadly, the narrow criteria used here does paint poor Athens as a dumb, dumb town. I will not reguritate the many reasons Athens is better for students than your survey would suggest. What I will do is ask you to look at the surrounding population of all of these college towns. Located in a traditionally liberal county but in a strongly agricultural part of GA, Athens has sucked in a lot of the North Georgia poor looking for handouts. Even more telling is the fact that Clarke County / Athens is geographically the smallest county in America (!). This means that the students live in town and the educated professionals live in the surrounding counties just a few miles away. Your apology is respectfully solicited.
Rethink
If by smallest you mean 121 square miles to Arlington, Virginia's 26.
hannah456
The data they are using to grade Athens, GA is based on the poor residents, not the over 35,000 students who attend the University of Georgia (who are not Athens/Clarke County residents). Athens might not be the "smartest" college town, but it is definitely not the "dumbest" college town. Athens is a very culturally diverse city, especially for the South, and attracts a wealth of intelligent and talented students and faculty. I would completely disregard this ranking as a valuable resource.
ThinkAgain
The criteria used is so convoluted as to make this meaningless and worse, likely manipulated. What a waste of time and effort.
Chichikov
Where is Burlington, Vermont? It should easily be in the top 5.
jdm-nc
Oh great you list Chapel Hill number one. Another reason to increase the "town's" inflated worth and traffic which I have to fight after work when I escape from Chapel Hell .
BTW Robert Gibbs grew up in Auburn, AL but attended NC State.
clearthinker
I hate these over-thought, no proof type of "rankings".
gogators515
Amen
almdavid
I agree with ThinkAgain: this is just an excuse to create a list and rank a bunch of towns based on nonsensical data. Who cares if 1 in 5 people in Champaign/Urbana holds a college degree. Does that make the University of Illinois less of a school? I notice that the towns the hold schools like Stanford, Yale, Chicago, and even Columbia aren't on the list. Should we presume, then, that Palo Alto, New York City, Chicago, and New Haven are therefore "stupid" cities?
janet1003mn
Where's Northfield, Minnesota on this list? Carlton College -- former professorial home of Senator Paul Wellstone -- was ranked the 8th best liberal arts college in the U.S. in 2009 by U.S. News and World Report. In addition, it has enrolled more students in the National Merit Scholarship Program than any other liberal arts college in the country. Then there's St. Olaf College. While only ranked at #47 in 2009 by the U.S. News and World Report list of liberal arts colleges, it did manage to get a mention in Loren Pope's Colleges that Change Lives,
It also ranks 8th overall among baccalaureate colleges in number of graduates who go on to earn doctorate degrees. Oh, and it has also produced nine Rhodes Scholars since 1910, including two in 2007, while an average of six St. Olaf students are awarded the Fulbright Scholarship each year.
almdavid
Thanks, Janet1003mn! I went to St. Olaf and took classes at Carleton, in the mid-1990s, and you're absolutely right. Northfield is an impressively well-educated little town, and back when I was there, it was even an answer in Trivial Pursuit: the only town in American with two colleges and only one bar. In other words, the colleges dominate Northfield.
I do, however, take some offense at your use of "only" in describing where St. Olaf falls in the U.S. News rankings. Forty-seventh out of all the schools in the country is not bad at all; while it may not be as impressive as 8th, it's still high enough to bolster your point that Northfield has a lot of smart people in it. Besides, the U.S. News rankings are highly suspect anyway, though not as suspect as the one we're commenting on.
janet1003mn
Sorry -- no offense intended! I meant the "only" not merely as a comparison to Carlton, but to bolster all that followed about St. Olaf's extremely impressive stats. I actually found more impressive information about St. Olaf, yet knowing that Carlton technically ranks higher, I left it to the reader to imagine really just how impressive an institution it must be to outrank St. Olaf in the first place.
I'm not sure if Northfield is a creative class haven because it is home to two such top-notch colleges or if Carlton and St. Olaf became what they are because of their unique environment. Either way, the DB editors made a bad call on this one.
Johnnyappleseed
Boulder Colorado....terrible!
h2os64
its KU, not UK.
reroha
how do they talk about basketball in the first sentence and not even know that....and exactly what warranted the 'C'???
h2os64
yeah. Its a common mistake. I know lawrence is super politically active so I would have to assume the C comes from poor statistical analysis. It is Kansas after all - we have a bad rep.
GreyDuck
As a "UK" Grad, I would say Lawrence is a mix of highly intelligent people and morons (Most of whom get weeded out after freshman year) Helium, Pluto, and an array of other things were discovered in Larryville. They have low admission standards but tougher classes. Also, Lawrence is surrounded by farm towns. Locals who never went to college move there because it's an oasis and it's more fun than Topeka. There is no way in hell, however, the Jayhawks are less smart than the "people" of Columbia, Misery. Their choice in alma maters is proof enough of this. ;)
eljhawk
Agreed...both the "UK" and the #12 ranking of Columbia, MO insulted my sensibilities. Every time I've found myself in Columbia, or speaking to most of its graduates, I'm always amazed at how narrow-minded their worldviews are. Not exactly my idea of a "smart" place to be.
h2os64
Yeah, I dont think the town deserves the C.. but I disagree, the school does. The classes are ridiculously easy in liberal arts, I spent my first two years there and the school itself, especially the students, are poorly motivated to do anything but go to the Hawk every night.
makemp
Was Wellesley, MA considered among the candidate towns?
mdstone35
As a current resident and restaurant professional in Chapel Hill I find it all a little hard to believe. This town may be book smart and laden with graduate degrees, but it can barely dine out. On a nightly basis I am astounded by the lack of common sense here and well, general stupidity. I have lived in Napa Valley, Charleston, SC and thankfully Charlottesville, but CH is special like in a special needs child kind of way. C-ville is about a million times more sophisticated and savvy than smart ol' CH. Bless its heart.
generall
thanks for all admin
Are you really cool
siki%u015F izle
Teuthida
I knew we were all smarter than the rest of you.
Teuthida, chapel Hill, NC
almdavid
If you're so much smarter, you shouldn't have to review the rules of written English. "Chapel" should be capitalized.
Teuthida
Wow. Had no idea. Thanks.
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