Arl, Va Drops to 2nd Most Educated 'City' in US aft Atlanta, Ga; DC Drops to 3rd aft Ann Arbor, Sil Vall
'Arlington Drops to Second Most Educated City in America,' ARLnow.com, Sept. 9, 2024. By Dan Egitto. - Ed. (Photo: George Mason University’s Arlington, Va campus). 🎓
(*Arlington is a COUNTY in Va. that gets ranked in with cities. SEE Below).
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Arlington has fallen from No. 1 to No. 2 in a ranking of the most educated “cities” in the country. The new ranking from FORBES Advisor spotlights Arlington’s status as having the nation’s highest percentage of residents aged 25 and older with bachelor’s degrees and graduate degrees — 78% and 43%, respectively. That’s a hair above last year’s percentages of 76% and 42%.
The county also has a high school dropout rate of just 4%.
However, a new place claimed Arlington’s spot as top dog in education this year: ATLANTA. Though ranking less favorably than Arlington in bachelor’s degrees, graduate degrees, dropout rates and equity gaps, the Georgia city clinched the top spot due to the use of weighted metrics.
“Atlanta scored higher due to stronger performance in the higher-weighted categories, resulting in a final score of 100.00, while Arlington CDP received a 97.14,” a FORBES Advisor spokesperson told ARLnow. Atlanta has a higher percentage of people aged 25 and up who have some college education but no degree: 14% compared to 8% in Arlington, according to the ranking.
Not appearing in this year’s list was D.C. Though the District ranked third last year, this time around, “D.C. did not make the top 100 due to updated metrics,” the spokesperson said. Another recent ranking, this one from WALLETHUB, ranked the D.C. area as a whole as the third most-educated metropolitan area in the United States, behind Ann Arbor, Mich. and the Silicon Valley area including San Jose, Calif.--
https://www.arlnow.com/2024/09/09/arlington-drops-to-second-most-educated-city-in-america/
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*'Why Arlington Gets Scooped Up in City Rankings,' ARLnow, Oct. 25, 2019,
Ever wondered why Arlington County gets scooped up in “city” rankings so often, despite being technically a county? Turns out it’s by design. The county is marked as a “Census Designated Place” (CDP) within the U.S. Census, which allows officials to compare it to cities as if the Arlington were one, too. And because data on CDPs and cities are both published in the same level of the federal survey, Arlington gets ranked against other U.S. cities by companies eager to rank everything from parks to bike friendliness.
“So that allows us to be ranked with cities, with counties, with neighborhoods, with other areas that have all receive that same designation,” said Elizabeth Hardy, a county planner. In the U.S., places are officially “incorporated” as cities and towns by a voting process determined by each state. Although some new places still get incorporated, most states have already incorporated all their land into cities or towns — like how the City of Alexandria and Richmond were both incorporated in the 1700s.
But some of the states settled earlier in America’s history, like Virginia, have places left unincorporated after a history of land grabbing — including Arlington. The exact history of why Arlington was left unincorporated and in need of a CDP is murky, but Hardy says it likely goes back to 1846 D.C. retrocession of the area, which led Virginia to declare Arlington and Alexandria independent jurisdictions.
“I think people will be surprised, especially in our region for Virginia and Maryland, a lot of the places out here are actually not incorporated,” said Vincent Osier, Branch Chief of the Geographic Standards and Criteria Branch at the U.S. Census Bureau...
https://www.arlnow.com/2019/10/25/why-arlington-gets-scooped-up-in-city-rankings/
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- Wiki. Arlington County, or simply Arlington, is a county in the U.S. state of Virginia. The county is located in Northern Virginia on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River directly across from Washington, D.C., the national capital.
Arlington County is coextensive with the U.S. Census Bureau's census-designated place of Arlington. Arlington County is the eighth-most populous county in the Washington metropolitan area with a population of 238,643 as of the 2020 census.
If Arlington County were incorporated as a city, it would rank as the third-most populous city in the state. With a land area of 26 square miles (67 km2), Arlington County is the geographically smallest self-governing county in the nation...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_County,_Virginia