Picking colleges for application or enrollment isn’t just picking a new school. Most likely, teenagers are moving away from their hometowns. Knowing something about the place being moved to as well as the college may add insights to the searching. The Atlantic Cities reported on the “Brainiest Cities” based on an online survey measuring cognitive abilities: memory, processing speed, flexibility, attention, and problem solving.
Below is a map indicating “Brainiest”-ness:
While a simple listing, shows that the top “Brainiest Cities” cluster around colleges. (Might be another ranking to consider when trying to expand the list of prospective colleges.)
Top 10 Brainiest CBSAs for People 35 Years of Age and Under
1. Ithaca, New York (Cornell University
2. State College, Pennsylvani (Penn State)
3. Kirksville, Missouri
4. Lafayette-West Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue University)
5. Ann Arbor, Michigan (University of Michigan)
6. Charlottesville, Virginia (University of Virginia)
7. Madison, Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
8. Burlington, North Carolina
9. Bloomington, Indiana (Indiana University Bloomington)
10. Iowa City, Iowa (University of Iowa)The list below details the top 10 cities on Luminosity’s overall cognitive performance index. Again college towns predominate, though this time cities and towns on the coasts do much better (again we list major universities and colleges in parentheses).
Top 10 Brainiest Cities
1. Stanford, California (Stanford University)
2. Princeton, New Jersey (Princeton University)
3. Storrs Mansfield, Connecticut (University of Connecticut)
4. Evanston, Illinois (Northwestern University)
5. Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard and MIT)
6. La Jolla, California (University of California, San Diego)
7. Amherst, Massachusetts (Amherst College, Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
8. West Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue University)
9. Ithaca, New York (Cornell University)
10. Davis, California (University of California, Davis)All of the top 10 cities are also college towns, not surprisingly: Stanford; Princeton; University of Connecticut; Northwestern; Harvard and MIT; University of California, San Diego; Amherst College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Hampshire College; Purdue University; Cornell; and the University of California, Davis.
Also, an interactive map from Lumosity, company that compiled the data.
