Brainiest and least brainy cities

[waterboy]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/03/the-10-least-brainy-citie_n_791233.html#s197388

This might 'splain some things around here. Certainly explains Texas. We rate smack in the middle and behind OKC. Heck, we're behind those folks in New Orleans. The real surprise to me was that 2/3 of our metro pop is over 25, and even though we think we're so cosmopolitan and well educated....we're on a par with that cowtown to the south, OKC.

One would expect college towns to do better and they do. But don't we have a fairly sizable college here?

[Red Arrow]

One would expect college towns to do better and they do. But don't we have a fairly sizable college here?

We need to raise our cost of living.  That would require pay raises which would increase adult earnings.

[Johnboy976]

This might be a little off topic, but did anyone notice that TU has one of the top ten paid university presidents in the country?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/15/the-highest-paid-college-presidents_n_783236.html#s181620

[waterboy]

He's doing pretty well among his peers. #6 on the list, ahead of Yale's president, pulling down over $1.6 million. Its good to be one of the smartest guys in a shallow pool of average. I can't comment on whether his performance rates that pay. Apparently his board thinks so.

One of the mistakes I made in analyzing the the size, depth and personality of the market in Tulsa was believing the hype that we are this compact little dynamo of entrepreneurs fueled with a pretty well educated, visionary, cosmopolitan population whose leaders knew how to run a city. That view keeps getting slammed every time a new study arrives with a dissonant truth and every time I watch our leaders playing government games while the city ripens. We have those traits available to us within the population, we simply ignore them. Instead we vote the bible, the party and oil.  

That keeps us pretty average but we keep believing we're special. A former poster here, who was otherwise nuts, nailed us pretty well. He asserts that Tulsa is a banana republic lead by a small group of clueless, wealthy elite who have no concept of life without a trust fund and have no plans to let go of power. FB, I have seen the light. Cynical Sunday I guess.

[dbacks fan]

http://www.city-data.com/city/Tulsa-Oklahoma.html

[waterboy]

Thank you Dback. I wish I had known about this site back in 2000. Among the more interesting factoids I gleaned from a quick glance-

David Duke is from Tulsa (hmmm)
The city swells nearly 20% larger each day as workers from outside the city arrive
Our most common church affiliation is Southern Baptist
Kerry got less support from Tulsa than Obama
Our most common industrial employer is construction
Average age 34

Cool stuff.

[we vs us]

We need to raise our cost of living.  That would require pay raises which would increase adult earnings.

How do you manage that?  Aside from, ahem, higher taxes.

[Red Arrow]

How do you manage that?  Aside from, ahem, higher taxes.

Easy.  Let PSO, ONG etc charge more.  Have our merchants raise their prices for the good of our rating on the brainest site. One of the criteria was good income.  In order to raise our cost of living and get the raises to pay for it, taxes will not be the answer since the local employers will need to give raises meet the higher income criteria.  Our life won't be any better.  People presently trapped here by our low wages and cost of living will be able to leave.  Our brainest rating will go up though.

[TheArtist]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/03/the-10-least-brainy-citie_n_791233.html#s197388

This might 'splain some things around here. Certainly explains Texas. We rate smack in the middle and behind OKC. Heck, we're behind those folks in New Orleans. The real surprise to me was that 2/3 of our metro pop is over 25, and even though we think we're so cosmopolitan and well educated....we're on a par with that cowtown to the south, OKC.

One would expect college towns to do better and they do. But don't we have a fairly sizable college here?

  Sizable college?  Where?  We don't have any that I know of. 

When I started going to college here we were the largest city in the US without a publicly funded graduate university.  We have barely made a dent in that designation. We have a smattering of new "starter campuses", but I have met people who would have considered moving to Tulsa but were unable to because our universitiy course and degree offerings were so limited.

  Speaking of jobs and education...  I have been ranting for several years now as I watch OKC get these large new medical facilities, programs, etc. with a large dose of state monies, while Tulsa basically gets the shaft in that department. We all know that one of the few growth industries is going to be in the medical fields.  Research, baby boomers getting older, Obamacare, etc. Those who are positioned to reap the benefits of the growing medical field will do well.  But Tulsa doesn't seem to be fighting for its share. 

I was complaining about OKC's bragging about its huge new Cancer research and treatment facility and how a Tulsa family was donating 12 million dollars to help build it.  Most of the TW posters after my comments were saying

"who cares where its built, as long as it gets built".

I kept thinking.... these morons, if OKC gets 80 and 90% of the money for projects like this, that basically means OKC gets 80 and 90 % of the jobs, jobs to build the facility, jobs from federal research grants, spin off companies and support jobs, our continued state tax dollars to maintain the facility from now till eternity, the fact that we now have to travel there and they dont which costs us more, and so on.

  The other similar thing that got my goat was the new huge Diabeties facility that went into the OKC medical campus.  Lets see,,, NE Oklahoma around Tulsa has the highest rates of diabeties, where will our state put its largest diabeties research and treatment facility?..... oh, well, OKC of course.  And Tulsans just sit by and let it happen without so much as thought.  Heck we will actually donate to it. 

  Their economy keeps getting better, they laugh all the way to the bank and brag about how well they are doing, and we keep struggling all the more.  They want to position themselves as the regional hub for the medical industry, and they are doing it, and more and more of us Tulsans will likely have to ship our sorry asses down there to get the best medical care.  Tulsa very well could have positioned itself to be THE regional hub, but we are letting OKC have it ALL.  Let us at least be tops in one aspect of the medical care and research fields lol.  No, they are going to have the biggest and best of everything, and we will be small, small potatos for the new medical industry jobs market.  One of the few, sure fire, growth industries in the future.


One of the other industries that will likely continue to do well in the near future is the oil/gas/mining industries.  OKC has surpassed us there too. We are not even top dog in the state anymore in that industry, how sad. I can't think of any reason that should have happened either, other than we let it.

  What industry, or industries, is our city wanting to grow?  Position itself to be tops in? What are we doing to make that happen?  I haven't seen anything in a long while.  And you can't say its because of the economy, this trend started well before it went in the tank and even since then others, like OKC, have been moving along on their plans, the industries they are going to go after and expand.  We would hear little smatterings of things like "Materials Sciences" at the new research facility at the OSU Tulsa campus... where has that gone? What happened there?  TU was going to focus on Internet Security, do stuff with the government, etc. But lately I have heard of other universities snagging huge grants and such,,, but not Tulsa?  Whats up?  On and on I could go.  We stagnate and let others take the initiative. Probably all happening while our city council and mayor sit around griping and navel gazing I guess.

[SXSW]

I blame OSU.  They have the potential to make the Tulsa campus their main center for health sciences, graduate studies and research but keep dragging their heels.  OU meanwhile has built an impressive medical complex in Oklahoma City, a huge research park in Norman, and its smaller Tulsa campus has added several new buildings with more planned.  OSU has built one new building at its health sciences campus and one new building at the OSU-Tulsa campus in the past decade.  Until OSU steps up and realizes Tulsa is the key to growth for the university in those aforementioned areas (medical, graduate programs, research) Tulsa will continue to stay behind OKC, which has OU and fast-growing UCO in its metro and OUHSC right next to downtown.  Yet OSU keeps building up its Stillwater campus.  I can only hope once T Boone Pickens dies he leaves OSU a lot of money and they are finally are able to fund their Tulsa initiatives.  He has given large donations to UT's medical center, why not his beloved OSU's Medical Center in Tulsa?

TU is a great school but needs to be bigger.  They should strive to be like Vanderbilt, a private research university that has a HUGE impact on Nashville.  Vanderbilt has just over 12,000 students with a little more than half undergraduates and the rest graduate and medical students.  TU should strive to increase its enrollment without sacrificing the quality of students, and to increase their research initiatives especially in engineering and sciences.  TU's impact with even two times the current enrollment (which would be around 9,500 students) would make a large impact in Tulsa.  TU and OU have agreed to form a joint medical school in Tulsa starting in 2014 so that is something to look forward to.  Thankfully OU is involved so we know it will be well-funded.

I think staying relevant in the energy industry (Tulsa is still one of the primary energy cities in the country) and promoting aerospace, along with health and research, will keep us from falling further behind.  We need our universities, specifically OSU but also TU, to step up first.

[Conan71]

Kerry got less support from Tulsa than Obama

It's all those damned racists in city council districts 1 & 3.

[waterboy]

How large is OCU in OKC? Seems like 9500 at TU students is a fair sized college. Half that should have an effect. OU has a large presence here as well as OSU. Tu has enough support to fund quite a bit of sports and building development. Edmond has a small university that does well in attracting brains to their  community.

So why don't we? Read Red's analysis of wages/income/brains and you get a fair  idea of what passes for leadership thought here. Its not an unusual analysis. Its just one that confirms mediocrity. Its circular reasoning. Thats what we have and it comes from the fact that we are as described in my second post above.

But I could be wrong....

[Red Arrow]

So why don't we? Read Red's analysis of wages/income/brains and you get a fair  idea of what passes for leadership thought here. Its not an unusual analysis. Its just one that confirms mediocrity. Its circular reasoning. Thats what we have and it comes from the fact that we are as described in my second post above.

But I could be wrong....

OK, I'll spell it out for you.

I disagree with the analysis. There does not appear to be any adjustment for the cost of living and therefore earnings.  Higher earnings, regardless of quality of life, appear to result in a higher "Brainy" score.  My point is that scoring higher on this survey is not necessarily an indication of braininess.  I believe the analysis is faulty.

Additionally, it is elitist to assume that all brainy people have higher formal education, that people without higher formal education are stupid, and that all people with higher formal education are brainy.  Don't confuse formal education with intelligence.

The scoring factors are below:
Factors: Portfolio.com established scores for five levels of educational attainment, based on the relative earning power of adult workers (25 or older). Scores were determined by comparing the 2007 median income for all workers ($33,452) with the median income for those workers at a specified educational level. Medians and the resulting scores are listed below:
•   Dropped out before high-school graduation (median of $19,405; 0.58 points)
•   Stopped at high-school diploma (median of $26,894; 0.80 points)
•   Stopped at associate degree or attended college, but stopped without any degree (median of $32,874; 0.98 points)
•   Stopped at bachelor's degree (median of $46,805; 1.40 points)
•   Earned graduate and/or professional degree (median of $61,287; 1.83 points)
Scoring: Each adult was assigned a score based on his or her highest level of educational attainment. Points for all adults (25 or older) within a market were averaged, yielding a raw figure that was converted to a final score. Above-average performances received positive scores, while below-average results received negative scores. Final scores ranged from 3.941 for Boulder, Colorado, to minus-2.558 for Merced, California.

[Conan71]

The original source was Huffpo.  Huff away...

[SXSW]

My wife and I did our part to help Tulsa on the list.  We both have bachelor's and master's degrees.