Coming off of a weekend that saw famed rapper and Twitter personality Lil B (the Based God) giving a lecture at MIT, Harvard hosting one of the year’s most spirited drunken tailgates, and a naked man falling through the ceiling into a women’s restroom at Logan Airport, it’s no surprise that Boston has been named the smartest city in America by Forbes.
Boston, specifically the “Boston-Cambridge-Newton metro area” beat out second place Pittsburgh for smartest large cities. Though some would argue our intellecutal superiority is self-evident, here’s how Forbes determined that Boston-area folks are the sharpest tacks at the Extremely Sharp Tacks Incorporated factory.
To determine the metro areas that are gaining brainpower in the 21st Century, we scored the nation’s 380 metropolitan statistical areas based on three criteria. We started with the growth rate in the number of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree from 2000 through 2013 (25% weighting in final score). But since the places that post the highest growth rates tend to be those starting with low levels of educational attainment, we gave greater weight to the percentage point increase in the share of the population that is college-educated over that span (50%), and we factored in the share of educated people in the population in 2013 (25%). We also separated out results for the 51 MSAs with over a million residents.
If you understood that paragraph on your first try, you’re probably from Boston.
[h/t Forbes]
