Here's The Most Educated Town In Every State

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We recently looked at the most affluent towns in every state. Now, we're turning our attention to educational achievement.

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The American Community Survey is an annual survey run by the Census Bureau to allow the government, corporate and academic researchers, and anyone who is curious about demographics to better understand the population of the United States. Among many other subjects, the ACS includes questions about respondents' education levels. Using the 2008-2012 ACS estimates for places with at least 1,000 population, Business Insider made a map showing, for each state, the town with the highest percentage of adults over 25 who have at least a bachelor's degree:

most educated places map

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from 2008-2012 American Community Survey

As with the affluent places, a good number of the most educated towns are suburbs of big cities. Many towns showed up on both maps, having both very high median incomes and educational attainment, like Scarsdale, NY and Chevy Chase, MD.

Some are college towns, like University Heights, IA and Wellesley, MA. Indeed, for four states - California, Mississippi, New York, and Pennsylvania - the highest ranking place was actually a college campus. Since we're focusing on towns, we removed the college campuses from our list.

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There was a bit more of a population spread for the best educated places than for the most affluent. Populations ranged from a little over 1,000 (our chosen lower cutoff) in Yarrow Point, WA all the way up to Fargo, ND, a city of 106,000.

Here's the fifty towns:

most educated places table

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from 2008-2012 American Community Survey