Austin Ranked 12th Smartest Metro Area—Rest of Texas ... Not So Much

Austin might lag slightly behind Dallas when it comes to popular cities where people would like to live, but when it comes to smarts, there's hardly any comparison: a recent study by The Daily Beast ranks us as 12th most intelligent among major metropolitan areas.

The study looked at 55 metro areas with populations of 1 million or more, and examined two criteria: education and "intellectual environment." The former metric took into consideration the number of college and advanced degrees, and didn't count those who had "some college” or “some grad school” (their explanation: "we rewarded those who finished the race"). To calculate the second metric, they considered nonfiction book sales (arguing that most fiction isn't "particularly thought-provoking"), the number of higher education institutions, and, most intriguing of all, the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election. All of this was then figured into a per-capita basis, fitted into a bell-curve, and then scaled so that it somewhat loosely resembles an IQ score.

Top cities included Raleigh-Durham, the Bay Area, Boston, Seattle-Tacoma, and most of the same places that we see showing up in ranking after ranking. Austin, at #12, came out ahead of New York City, Salt Lake City and Atlanta.

With an effective "IQ Score" of 129, the Daily Beast hails Austin as being "both Texas’ capital and academic hub—a formula, as we’ve seen, for intellectual success," but notes that our levels of political engagement were noticeably lower than in other high-ranking cities.

Meanwhile, the three other major metro areas in Texas were all among the bottom ten: Houston, tied for 46th place, had a dismal score of 66 ("the number of postsecondary institutions for a city this size is abysmal"); citizens of Dallas-Fort Worth, at 48th, "are less interested than most in reading and voting"; and San Antonio, at 53rd with a score of 26, was too low to warrant any actual criticism.