Newton: #8 Smartest Suburb in Country
Newton is one of the smartest suburbs in the country! I grew up in Seal Beach, California and that made #9! I’m feeling very intelligent today!
Here are the 10 smartest suburbs in America:
1. Santa Monica, CA
2. Evanston, IL
3. Berkeley, CA
4. Cambridge, MA
5. Towson, MD
6. Cupertino, CA
7. Scottsdale, AZ
8. Newton, MA
9. Seal Beach, CA
10. Alameda, CA
#8 Newton, Massachusetts
Source: Flickr user Daniel J. Sierdaski
Of all of the suburbs we looked at, this one had the very highest percentage of residents with bachelor’s degrees or higher: 75.04 percent. That’s almost three times the national average.
This city isn’t just impressive at the college level—it also scored well for its public schools, with a rating of nine out of 10, and, with a 95 percent high school graduation rate, ranked the ninth best in this category.
#9 Seal Beach, California
Seal Beach is yet another suburb disproving any stereotypes that you thought might be true about Southern California. Well, at least as far as intelligence goes.
Tied with our other California city, Cupertino, schools in Seal Beach had the highest ranking from GreatSchools.org, a perfect 10.
Locals probably spend all of their time studying it up in one of the city’s public libraries, for which it ranked fifth most per capita. No, just kidding, they’re probably all at the beach—just instead of Cosmo, they’re reading Chaucer.
Methodology
Movoto started by collecting data for 109 different suburbs using business listings, Greatschools.org, and the U.S. Census American Community Survey. Then, they ranked them from one to 109 in the following criteria:
- Colleges and universities per capita
- Public libraries per capita
- Museums per capita
- Percentage of students with bachelor’s degrees or higher
- High school graduation rate
- GreatSchools.org rating (based on test scores for the area)
They averaged these rankings into one overall Big Deal Score, where the lowest score was the best and brightest suburb, none other than Santa Monica.
If you’re curious about how they defined a suburb, they considered any large population center near one of the nation’s 50 largest cities, but also factored in whether or not the place was called a suburb on Wikipedia, in the list of inner-ring suburbs, or in any official capacity.
