Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Las Vegas ranks near bottom of ‘Brainiest Bastions’ list

It’s been a little more than a month since the Daily Beast declared Las Vegas the nation’s “dumbest city,” but the city apparently has made a small amount of progress.

Portfolio.com released its list of America’s “Brainiest Bastions.” No, Las Vegas wasn’t at the bottom of the list — it was second-to-last.

And that’s just on the short list of metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents — the same group of cities as the Daily Beast list. On the full Portfolio.com list, Las Vegas was No. 159 out of 200, which sounds better than dead last.

Unlike the Daily Beast’s scoring, which included information about book sales, libraries and number of colleges, Portfolio.com considered only residents' college degrees to make the rankings.

The website used data from the U.S. Census Bureau about the nation’s 200 largest metro areas to calculate a city’s “brainpower index” based on the number of people with various levels of education.

Scores ranged from a high of 3.941 in Boulder, Colo., to -2.558 in Merced, Calif.

Las Vegas had a score of -0.776.

The website said 7.19 percent of Las Vegans over the age of 25 have earned a graduate and/or professional degree, 14.49 percent have a bachelor’s degree, 32.2 percent stopped with an associate’s degree or attended college without getting a degree, 29.07 percent stopped at high school diploma and 17.05 dropped out before graduating from high school.

The website points out that people with more advanced degrees typically earn more money.

The highest-scoring cities were mostly college towns, with Boulder, Colo., on top, followed by Ann Arbor, Mich.; Washington, D.C.; Durham, N.C.; and Fort Collins, Colo.

Cities in California and Texas took the bottom spots on the list: Bakersfield, Calif.; Visalia, Calif.; Brownsville, Texas; McAllen-Edinburg, Texas; and Merced, Calif.

For metro areas with a population of at least 1 million, Washington, D.C., had the best score, followed by San Jose, Calif.; Boston; San Francisco-Oakland; and Raleigh, N.C.

At the bottom of the large-cities list were Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.; San Antonio, Texas; Memphis, Tenn.; Las Vegas; and coming in last, Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.

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