America's 10 dumbest cities

[Skill and Chance]

I think this study is only flawed if you take "brainy" to mean intelligence, when I think it's just a catchy title they're giving a study on education.  Actually, I think it's pretty cool.

The title should then be, "The Ten Least Educated Cities."

By and large, perceived intelligence is a function of the educational opportunities that are available to someone.  The genetic component is minimal except in extreme cases IMO.

[Alcon]

I think this study is only flawed if you take "brainy" to mean intelligence, when I think it's just a catchy title they're giving a study on education.  Actually, I think it's pretty cool.

The title should then be, "The Ten Least Educated Cities."

Yes...we're all aware.

[J. J.]

I think this study is only flawed if you take "brainy" to mean intelligence, when I think it's just a catchy title they're giving a study on education.  Actually, I think it's pretty cool.

The title should then be, "The Ten Least Educated Cities."

By and large, perceived intelligence is a function of the educational opportunities that are available to someone.  The genetic component is minimal except in extreme cases IMO.

Who mentioned genetics?  And who came up with that bizarre "educational opportunities" definition.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

What the hell is in Merced CA?  Never heard of it.

[phk]

What the hell is in Merced CA?  Never heard of it.

UC Merced amusingly.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

What the hell is in Merced CA?  Never heard of it.

UC Merced amusingly.

Wow, a podunk campus of the UC system with a bunch of dumbs?  I meant the area itself.  Rural? Farming? Hi Tech?

[sparkey]

What the hell is in Merced CA?  Never heard of it.

UC Merced amusingly.

Wow, a podunk campus of the UC system with a bunch of dumbs?  I meant the area itself.  Rural? Farming? Hi Tech?

It's in the San Joaquin Valley between Fresno and Modesto, an agricultural area, so farming. The new university there is still growing. It has a lot of immigrant farm workers living there.

[phk]

What the hell is in Merced CA?  Never heard of it.

UC Merced amusingly.

Wow, a podunk campus of the UC system with a bunch of dumbs?  I meant the area itself.  Rural? Farming? Hi Tech?

It's in the San Joaquin Valley between Fresno and Modesto, an agricultural area, so farming. The new university there is still growing. It has a lot of immigrant farm workers living there.

The impetus to put the UC in Merced was likely to move it out of rankings like this.

Btw, I wonder where other San Joaquin Valley towns ranked like Madera or Tulare.

[sparkey]

The impetus to put the UC in Merced was likely to move it out of rankings like this.

Btw, I wonder where other San Joaquin Valley towns ranked like Madera or Tulare.

They didn't rank Madera or Tulare. Of all the San Joaquin Valley cities they did rank, we have (out of 200):

188. Fresno
190. Stockton
191. Modesto
196. Bakersfield
197. Visalia
200. Merced

I'm from Fresno, the brainiest SJ Valley city (and only 13th dumbest in the US!).

[phk]

The impetus to put the UC in Merced was likely to move it out of rankings like this.

Btw, I wonder where other San Joaquin Valley towns ranked like Madera or Tulare.

They didn't rank Madera or Tulare. Of all the San Joaquin Valley cities they did rank, we have (out of 200):

188. Fresno
190. Stockton
191. Modesto
196. Bakersfield
197. Visalia
200. Merced

I'm from Fresno, the brainiest SJ Valley city (and only 13th dumbest in the US!).

I'm from Fresno too, well lived there for 15 years.

I wonder where Clovis and slightly more upscalish areas would rank.

[angus]

Complete list (200 cities)link

It'd be interesting to see how they came up with the "brainpower index."

Also, 39.2% of the population 25 and over in Cedar Falls, Iowa have at least a Bachelor degree, making it higher than any city on the list you provide.  Also, 16.2% of the Cedar Falls population has a graduate/professional degree, which is higher than all except eleven of the cities on your list.  Obviously they didn't try to rank small cities, but it's worth mentioning.

"brainiest bastions" is a cute, alliterative title, but it's not very descriptive.  A more boring, but more descriptive, title would be "Educational attainment-index ranking of U.S. cities with greater than 125 thousand people" or something like that.  It'd also be nice if the PDF defined the index.

[sparkey]

The impetus to put the UC in Merced was likely to move it out of rankings like this.

Btw, I wonder where other San Joaquin Valley towns ranked like Madera or Tulare.

They didn't rank Madera or Tulare. Of all the San Joaquin Valley cities they did rank, we have (out of 200):

188. Fresno
190. Stockton
191. Modesto
196. Bakersfield
197. Visalia
200. Merced

I'm from Fresno, the brainiest SJ Valley city (and only 13th dumbest in the US!).

I'm from Fresno too, well lived there for 15 years.

I wonder where Clovis and slightly more upscalish areas would rank.

I would also be interested in seeing education levels in places like Clovis; I bet it's respectable but probably nothing that would impress the rest of the nation. They have an awesome high school system there but not a lot of tech industry or anything like that. That means that kids get educated well there, but there is a ton of brain drain. I have lived in both Fresno and Clovis and Clovis is definitely more education-focused.

Still, there aren't too many "upscalish" areas in the SJ Valley to begin with. Glancing at Wikipedia's "median income for a household" figures, I'm seeing:

Tracy, $62,794
Ripon, $56,979
Manteca, $46,677
Los Banos, $43,690
Clovis, $42,283

I'm probably missing some, but I can't find any more above $40,000, which isn't even that high. And the only reason Tracy has money is because of exurbers from the Bay Area, which make up a huge part (most?) of their population.

[cinyc]

The impetus to put the UC in Merced was likely to move it out of rankings like this.

Btw, I wonder where other San Joaquin Valley towns ranked like Madera or Tulare.

They didn't rank Madera or Tulare. Of all the San Joaquin Valley cities they did rank, we have (out of 200):

188. Fresno
190. Stockton
191. Modesto
196. Bakersfield
197. Visalia
200. Merced

I'm from Fresno, the brainiest SJ Valley city (and only 13th dumbest in the US!).

Well, they sort of did for some.  Judging from the listed populations and city names, the rankings appear to be by metropolitan statistical area, not city, as strictly defined.  Tulare should be in there with Visalia.   Madera is part of the Fresno-Madera CSA, but has its own separate metro area.  The Madera-Chowchilla metro wasn't included because it's not one of the top 200 metros.

[angus]

It should be the ten least educated cities.

Yeah... the study is pretty flawed.

I don't think there's any flaw.  It's just poorly named.  And Dead0man's thread title is extremely misleading.  And there's no link to the information other than a PDF.

If you go to portfolio.com, you can get a direct link to the explanation.  (Click on US Uncovered) The article is entitled "Brain Bounty or Brain Busted?"  They just love that alliteration!  No points for accuracy, but you gotta give them points for trying to be cute.  I suppose.  There they explain the index.  It's based neither on smarts nor lack thereof.  In fact, it's not strictly based on educational attainment either, but rather on economic data.  But, bad marketing aside, there's nothing flawed about the study.

They took the 200 largest metropolitan areas in the country--so it's not even the smartest/dumbest cities, nothing about the thread title is accurate--and they compared incomes in five groups, as follows, with average annual earnings for all workers, at each level (as of 2007) in parentheses:

 Advanced degree ($61,287)
 Bachelor's degree ($46,805)
 Associate degree or college dropout ($32,874)
 High-school graduate ($26,894)
 High-school dropout ($19,405)

Ratios for each category were then determined by dividing the 2007 median income for that educational level category by the corresponding figure for all workers ($33,452).  Those ratios don't show up directly in the PDF which dead0man linked, but you can calculate them easily enough.  Scores (fractional contributions) for each category were simply the product of the fractional population of that category and the ratio.  Totals for all adults within a market were averaged and then converted to a final, overall score, with above-average income ratios given a positive score, and below-average ratios given a negative score.  Note that it is possible for a market to receive a positive score or a negative score.  

For example, in boulder, 25.96% of the population has a graduate or professional degree.  dividing 61287 by 33452 yields a ratio of 1.83.  This gets multiplied by 0.2596.  So the fractional population for that category in Boulder is 0.475.  And so on.  So you can see that this does not say anything specific about the average salaries in any area.  It merely assigns a number to a market based on average salaries within educational categorizations.  I'm not sure how useful any of this is, if you're just graduating college and looking to move where you'll get a big paycheck.  It doesn't seem to be meant for that purpose.  Or any other purpose except getting a publication in a journal.  But I would not say the study was "flawed" unless they used bad data.  Or if they were double-dipping.  Comparing their data to city-data.com I don't see any evidence that the data was substantially in error, and I confirmed that they weren't double dipping at least in the Boulder case, so I think it's all kosher.

As an aside, using their formula for Cedar Falls data I come up with 1.19, or about the same as Austin, Provo, Santa Cruz, or Denver.  Here, I assumed that we take only that fraction of bachelor's folks who do not have any more advanced degrees and multiply that by the 1.83, etc.  This is because the fifth column of the table includes folks whose highest educational attainment is a bachelor's degree, which is different (smaller) than the overall bachelor's degree data that you can find on many websites.  Also, I quickly found data on the HS dropout rate in Cedar Falls (about 7.5%), and the grad degree rate (16.2%), and the number of those holding bachelor's but no grad degrees (23%), but made some assumptions about the two middle groups, as that number is a bit harder to come by.  

Jeezus, dead0man, I realize that your point wasn't to make an intelligent post, but rather a provocative one.  I can respect that.  But you could at least have provided a direct link to the actual explanation of the pdf so that those of us who were interested in the study could have understood it.

[Хahar 🤔]

What the hell is in Merced CA?  Never heard of it.

It's a town on the way to Yosemite.

[politicalchick20]

Fort Smith, AR being there hurts a little--my dad grew up there (and is definitely NOT dumb--but of course, I know this deals with current residents ).

Thinking of it as somewhere other than where I visit my grandparents every summer, though...it makes some sense.

[angus]

My best friend in High school was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas.  He got a 2 in 12th-grade calculus.  I mean, we got graded on a percent scale.  He got a 2!  As in, 2 out of 100.  He rarely showed up to class.  He always had good weed.  We also had Spanish IV together in the 12th grade.  First period.  Usually we got there about 30 minutes late.  Luckily our teacher was very, very cool.  I'd often swing by and pick him up in my car on the way to school.  And sometimes we'd take his car.  It was a ghetto, rusted-out, 12-year-old Chevy Nova.  Pink.  I think it may have been some shade of brown, but by the time he bought it the sun had turned it pink.  I think he paid 300 dollars for that car.  But he installed this killer Rockford-Fosgate stereo/amplifier system, with huge speakers where the back seat used to be.  A 300-dollar car with a 1500-dollar stereo.  He lived about three blocks from our school, and as I recall that three-block trip would sometimes take us 20 minutes, no matter whose car we took.  Good times.

Guess that's all I know about Fort Smith.  I've never been there.  But every time I hear the name Fort Smith I always think of my best friend from the 12th grade.  He definitely was not dumb.  Had weird priorities, maybe, but as I recall he was smart.  Always had excellent weed.

[cannonia]

The impetus to put the UC in Merced was likely to move it out of rankings like this.

The San Joaquin Valley was "owed" a UC...  There was a lot of agitating for a number of years to get the school built.

[phk]

The impetus to put the UC in Merced was likely to move it out of rankings like this.

The San Joaquin Valley was "owed" a UC...  There was a lot of agitating for a number of years to get the school built.

I'm surprised that Merced beat Fresno and Madera for the location.