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Web site: Greensboro ain't so smart

Friday, October 9, 2009
(Updated Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - 3:04 pm)
Staff Reports

Raleigh? You get an A+.

Charlotte? Looks like a B.

And Greensboro? How about a C-?

In a Web site's ranking of the nation's smartest cities, the Raleigh-Durham area came out on top. Charlotte was 16.

And the Triad area that includes Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point? We're 37th. (We think that's below the median, but that's just a guess because we've heard we're not so hot at math.)

The Daily Beast, a news-and-opinion Web site, ranked the nation's largest 55 cities based on brainpower. The per-capita rankings considered education and intellectual environment and included percentage of residents with bachelor's and master's degrees, nonfiction book sales, ratio of institutions of higher education and voter participation. (For a look at the Web site's methodology — that's a big word that we had to look up in the dictionary, and it means "how they did it" — click here.)

The Web site did not identify the source for most of its datum. (Or is that its data? This is so hard.)

Here's what The Daily Beast says about the Triad:

North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad, consisting of Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point, has always existed in the shadow of another trio just to its east — the nationally known Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

The Triad’s ranking here won’t change anything. The Research Triangle tops our list while the Triad ends up in the bottom half. with an IQ score of 83. Better luck when Wake Forest hosts UNC this season.

Greensboro was tied with Jacksonville, Fla., where "the higher education scores — institutions, college graduates, advanced degrees — were subpar across the board."

Greensboro ranked ahead of Detroit (40th), Norfolk, Va. (41st), Houston (46th), Memphis (51st) and Fresno, Calif. (55th and last)

Here are the Web site's 10 smartest cities:

1. Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
2. San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, Calif.
3. Boston, Mass.
4. Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn.
5. Denver, Colo.
6. Hartford and New Haven, Conn.
7. Seattle and Tacoma, Wash.
7. Washington, D.C.
9. Portland, Ore.
10. Baltimore, Md.

To read about The Daily Beast had to say about Raleigh-Durham, click here.

To read what the site said about Charlotte, click here.

Accompanying Photos

Michael McQueen

Photo Caption: The Greensboro skyline.

Comments

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countryboy

October 9, 2009 - 8:28 am EDT

Well dat der's jest crazie talk!

rightwingnemesis

October 9, 2009 - 8:32 am EDT

We must accept what is true and try to improve. Greensboro is NOT Raleigh and is NOT Charlotte. In some ways that may be good, but in the context of the article and rankings, it is NOT good.

holland4

October 9, 2009 - 8:57 am EDT

Journalism is dead.

tahoeman1971

October 9, 2009 - 9:12 am EDT

Anyone that reads the LTE comments on this site could have told you this news.

Gymnaseum

October 9, 2009 - 9:22 am EDT

I like to keep abreast of such hard-hitting news. "Give us this day our daily breast", pray tell. Or prattle.

Education = smarts. Well, sometimes. For my money, the smartest people I have ever met were Dutch farmers with only modest education. Maybe that's just wisdom. If it's (note the contraction, rather than the incorrect use as possessive in the article)...I say, if it's book-learning and techno-savvy that count more, well, that's Raleigh in a slam-dunk.

Bomolochus

October 9, 2009 - 9:54 am EDT

Well, I don't know why we would ever need any of that fancy book lern'in anyway...

wbivie

October 9, 2009 - 11:00 am EDT

Oscar Wilde once said, "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

The Daily Beast should remember that tidbit as well before making what is essentially an irrelevant list. Simply saying that because the triad area may not have as many diplomas per capita, or Universities per square mile doesn't mean that the average IQ is lower than that of any other randomly selected city. Equating IQ to book sales, degrees, or voter participation is stupid, in my opinion. I always thought IQ was a measure of intelligence, not success, voting or buying the latest Glenn Beck book.

Either way, the article seems to be fairly pointless...to me, anyway.

pragmatist

October 9, 2009 - 11:14 am EDT

How's this for math and, also, geography: since we're 37th in the Nation and two other metros in our state are also included, that means our area is 'smarter' than any Metro area in at least 15 entire states.

invisibleman

October 9, 2009 - 7:07 pm EDT

There are some states that do not have a metro area over a million people, so that statement is not true. For example, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, West Virginia, Idaho, Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii, the Dakotas, Montana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Deleware, Iowa, New Mexico, South Carolina, etc.

nemrac

October 9, 2009 - 1:00 pm EDT

WOW what a terrible photograph of downtown Greensboro! That photographer and picture editor are the ones that "ain't so smart". Couldn't even take time to remove the sensor dust specks from the sky, maybe the photog didn't know how to.

tonymo

October 9, 2009 - 1:53 pm EDT

Folks, the Daily Beast is a left wing web site, so take anything they say with a grain of salt. This simply means that Charlotte and Raliegh are even more liberal than Greensboro.

Andrew Brod

October 9, 2009 - 2:52 pm EDT

Of course tonymo is wrong. Not about the Daily Beast, but about the numbers. There's not much room for interpretation here. These numbers are in line with raw data I've seen and with other rankings. The long-term problem we face (once we fully escape this recession) is not an insufficient number of jobs, but an insufficient number of skilled people to fill the jobs our economy creates. The educational-attainment train is about to leave the station, and Greensboro runs the risk of missing it altogether.

Andrew Brod

October 9, 2009 - 2:56 pm EDT

Having said that, this ranking is similar to the silly Forbes ranking from earlier this year (that Greensboro was among the "emptiest" cities in the country). The DB ranking isn't about cities, per se, but their metro areas. Well, the Greensboro/High Point metro area is made up of Rockingham, Randolph, and Guilford counties. The cities of Greensboro and High Point make up a tad less than half the total population of the three-county region, so this is as much about rural Rockingham and Randolph as it is about Greensboro.

tahoeman1971

October 9, 2009 - 7:54 pm EDT

It is also about the 70% of black kids born without involved fathers and illegal aliens that do not speak our language. Let's not beat around the bush to be politically correct. You think things are bad now. Have you seen how "well" our schools performs since we started our creative "busing" to put minority kids into all schools for the sake of diversity. You think we are dumb now? You have not seen anything yet. Wait for about 15 years.

mygiza

October 10, 2009 - 12:59 am EDT

In creating the profiles of typical citizens as smart---(possibly) means the sample city/community has members with the fewest number of criminals.Demographics that measure scholastic degrees per metropolis metric involves citizenship and society membership that builds around education systems.Those research centers that are culturally diverse stand the best chance to promote industrial development. Future fuel for thought: Many of these smartest cities have great public transit systems.

Andrew Brod

October 10, 2009 - 2:05 pm EDT

Contrary to the politically incorrect views of tahoeman, in fact the decline in American educational achievement is not primarily a story about minorities. Correct for socioeconomics, and we're still gradually sucking compared to the rest of the world. This is a story that is just as much about white middle-class kids as anyone else.

tahoeman1971

October 10, 2009 - 10:42 pm EDT

It sure is Andrew. It is about kids from all backgrounds that are born out of wedlock. White, black whatever color. The nuclear family is integral to success for every society. It just happens to be the case that 70% of black kids are born into single parent homes. Please explain how this has no impact on our rating.

Andrew Brod

October 13, 2009 - 10:07 am EDT

Sheesh, tahoeman, do you know any other tunes? The U.S.'s decline in educational attainment is on display in two-parent white middle-class families as well. It's not solely (and perhaps not even primarily) about the social pathologies that you apparently believe explain everything.

truth

October 9, 2009 - 2:07 pm EDT

Maybe Raleigh but I'm not buying Durham.

NewsToMe

October 9, 2009 - 3:51 pm EDT

Not sure if this is on purpose or not but I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw the misspelling of "cities" in this article. It says "...10 smartest cites:"

Voice of Reason

October 9, 2009 - 4:26 pm EDT

May the judging was done based on the city council. Just a thought.

swalker01

October 9, 2009 - 7:44 pm EDT

Au Contraire Mon Frère...we are smart enough not to live in the top 10 cities...

Andrew Brod

October 10, 2009 - 9:55 pm EDT

I just remembered--I wrote about this in the N&R in 2005:

https://web.uncg.edu/bae/documents/cber/article0ew3eaoeyA.pdf

And then relatedly in the BizJ in 2008 (scroll down a bit):

https://web.uncg.edu/bae/documents/cber/article3et63LfD2x.pdf

I don't know what methodology the Daily Beast used, but the results ring true, at least within North Carolina.

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