Highly educated people bolster the economic growth and tax revenues of the areas in which they live, WalletHub, a personal finance website, said in a new study.
Those with higher levels of education tend to earn higher salaries, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the more they earn, the more tax dollars they contribute over time, the Economic Policy Institute reports.
For their part, well-educated people want to live where they will get a good return on their educational investment, WalletHub said. And as people also tend to marry others with similar educational levels, cities with large educated populations may be more attractive to people with degrees.
However, highly educated people will have different reasons for choosing one area over another. Some will prefer to live among people with similar education levels for socializing and career connections. Others may want to stand out among a smaller group of similarly educated folks.
“Higher education doesn’t guarantee better financial opportunities in the future, but it certainly correlates with it,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo said in a statement. “The most educated cities provide good learning opportunities from childhood all the way through the graduate level.”
That said, not every city will provide the same quality of life to people with higher education.
To determine where the most educated Americans are putting their degrees to work, WalletHub compared the 150 most populated U.S. metropolitan statistical areas across these key dimensions:
- Educational attainment (80 points), including share of adults 25 and older who have a high school diploma or higher, who have at least some college experience or an associate degree or higher, who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, who have a graduate or professional degree
- Quality of education and attainment gap (20 points), including quality of public school system, average quality of universities, enrolled students in top 822 universities per capita, number of summer learning opportunities per capita, and racial and gender gap
Researchers evaluated those dimensions using 11 relevant metrics and graded each one on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest educational attainment and quality of education.
See the accompanying gallery for the 12 most-educated U.S. cities, according to WalletHub.
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