OT - Ann Arbor: the smartest city in the country.
If percentage of population with a bachelors degree, or graduate degree = smartest.
I thought this was pretty cool, and being a life long Ann Arborite it makes me proud. Thought I would share.
Yay us.
http://www.annarbor.com/news/ann-arbor-beats-cambridge-and-berkeley-for-smartest-city-in-the-nation/
but you probably knew that.
My nephew visiting for the Nebraska game marveled "People sure use big words in this town" and this comment came after spending a night in the student bars.
My old housemate moved to Milwaukee for his residency and he couldn't believe the difference in the attention he got. In Ann Arbor, nobody really cared that he was in/had gone to medical school. Big deal, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone with a fancy degree. But in Milwaukee, he'd get the raised eyebrows, the deferential manner, even DATES.
I'm guessing that had a lot more to do with going from a med student to a DOCTOR. $$$$$
Ha, that reminds me of when my sister came to visit me while I was attending U-M (she attended a party school in Florida). While we were walking around campus she said, "Wow this is like a *real* college."
I went to a Michigan-Ohio State game in A2 with a girl I worked with who graduated from Ohio State. After the game we walked around A2. By the end of the day, she said that she felt cheated that she went to OSU.
For some reason, I also would have preferred they had said "best educated" and not "smartest", and only because no one has ever come to a consensus on what exactly "smart" means, and that's going back to the days when Binet and Wechsler were the people in the know in the field of psychometrics. If you're a fan of the cognitive theories, of course, we can always run the city's residents through the battery of tests they use for the PASS Theory.
He musta learned real good!
Unfortunately, we're only 4th on Amazon's most well-read list.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/16/living/amazon-well-read-cities/index.html
It's funny seeing Boulder on that list considering the most popular books in Boulder Bookstore are about running across the country or getting lost in the wilderness. Not that these aren't interesting topics, but not exactly intellectually stimulating.
Even the squirrels are smart in A2.
They're fat.
..... "whom."
Iif there were any characteristic that a city should be aiming for it would probably be diversity. And by that I mean with regards to education levels as well as diversity of ethnicity, race, culture, etc.
A population of 70% (or more) holding bachelor degrees means that you probably have over-educated grocery clerks, waiters, street-sweeps, etc. in places like Ann Arbor and Berkeley. To consider the bigger picture, it would probably be better for the state and the nation if the educated were spread more evenly amongst all towns/cities.
I just moved to Ypsilanti two weeks ago. It may have made the difference.
Bethesda, MD has higher percentages. Note at the bottom of the article that they are expanding the rankings to cities of other sizes. Way to take a sloppy journalism piece and run with it.