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From: royle@unity.ncsu.edu (Jeffrey A Royle)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: MOST PHDs per 1000 folks (the data from the N&O article)
Date: 6 Jul 1994 03:15:35 GMT

Ok, here are the numbers from the June 26 N&O article pertaining to the number of Doctorates (Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s) per 1000 people:

Metro. Area Population/1000 Doctorates Per 1000

1. Champaign/Urbana/Rantoul 173 4541 26.245
2. Sante Fe, NM 117 3043 26.042
3. State College, PA 124 3094 24.995
4. Bryon/College Station TX 122 2989 24.528
5. Ann Arbor, MI 283 6825 24.122
6. Iowa City, IA 96 2307 24.001
7. Lawrence, KA 82 1900 23.228
8. Columbia, MO 112 2468 21.961
9. Lafayette/West Lafayette IN 131 2816 21.562
10. Boulder/Longmong, CO 225 4800 21.301
11. Bloomington, IN 109 2246 20.610
12. Athens, GA 156 3154 20.183
13. Gainesville, FL 204 4057 19.876
14. Charlottesville, VA 131 2455 18.725
15. Trenton, NJ 326 5743 17.626
16. Raleigh/Durham, NC 735 12561 17.079
17. Madison, WI 367 5762 15.697
18. Fort Collins/Loveland, CO 186 2704 14.527
19. Tallahassee, FL 234 3177 13.600
20. Boston, MA 2871 34916 12.163

    ---

And there it is. Interestingly, most of the ones making the top 20 are small college towns, and the number of Ph.D.s in those towns is roughly equal to the number of faculty in a good sized university (no surprise there, I guess).

Also, these are (i believe) Census Bureau MSAs, and so don't necessarily contain areas that you think they might (or maybe contain areas that you wouldn't necessarily think they do).

On that note, Does anyone out there know if Chapel Hill is contained in the Raleigh/Durham MSA? Maybe we got ripped off of a good number of Ph.D.s in this survey!!

For the record, the lowest concentration of Ph.D.s is in Norwalk, Conn. which has a whopping 291 Ph.D.s for it's 1,271,000 population (0.229 per 1000).