New York City might not be smart in the eyes of Portfolio.com but we think they need to get their vision checked. Urbanophile recently looked at the same census data as Portfolio (who ranked us #36 in brains) and found something totally different. When you look at the density per square mile of those with college and graduate degrees New York comes in an easy second behind San Francisco and way ahead of Boston. And we'll be ahead of SF soon enough if current trends continue.
In the past decade Manhattan alone increased its density of people with college degrees by 7,500 people per square mile, easily out gaining the rest of the country. That's about 171,000 additional degrees living on island in the past nine years—enough to be the 141st largest city in the country!
And the smarts aren't just increasing in Manhattan. Kings county saw an increase of over 2,000 people per square mile, more than San Francisco county by a long shot. In fact, New York county, Kings county and Queens county have shown the most growth in college degrees per square mile of in the whole country.
Now, to be fair, college degrees don't make you smart (trust us) and the number of college degrees in an area doesn't really mean much—but we're happy to take any bragging rights we can.
