Boulder scores highest out of 200 U.S. metros on Portfolio.com’s brain-o-meter

Need Boulder residents be reminded of just how smart they are? Probably not. But in case the world didn’t know, Portfolio.com ranked Boulder the smartest metro in the U.S. after analyzing the nation’s 200 largest markets.

Boulder is the home of the University of Colorado and is a “burgeoning hub for high-technology, electronics and aerospace companies,” and is therefore blessed with an economic mix that places a premium on education, according to the online magazine.

The result is a broadly educated workforce: five of every six adults in the Boulder area (82.5 percent) have attended college – the strongest concentration in the study group –  while26 percent of Boulder’s residents hold master’s, doctoral or professional degrees – also the highest figure in the country, Portfolio.com reports.

The online magazine says that the U.S. Census Bureau data shows a worker with an advanced degree will earn 31 percent more than a colleague with a bachelor’s degree and 128 percent more than somebody who never went beyond high school.

Portfolio.com determined the rankings based on point values assigned to five rungs of an educational ladder, from high-school dropouts to holders of advanced degrees The score for a given market depended on the percentage of residents age 25 or older on each rung. The higher the score, the stronger a market’s collective brainpower.

Fort Collins (with Loveland included), home to Colorado State University, also joined Boulder on the list, coming in at No. 5 and making Colorado the only state with two cities among the top 10.

At the opposite end of the rankings are several Texas and California markets where college graduates are outnumbered by high-school dropouts, according to Portfolio.com. Last place belongs to Merced, California, with a score of -2.558. Thirty-four percent of Merced’s adult residents left high school without receiving diplomas, and only 11.3 percent hold at least a bachelor’s degree.

The Portfolio.com study encompassed the 200 metropolitan areas with populations greater than 207,000. If the rankings are confined to markets with at least 1 million residents, the five areas with the strongest brainpower are Washington (third in the overall standings), San Jose (seventh), Boston (eighth), San Francisco-Oakland (10th), and Raleigh (12th).

The top 10 brainiest metros in the top 10 are: