We're gonna see a real drop in the average IQ when Bush shows up. Thankfully, it will just be temporary.

Education level is NOT equal to intelligence. I know Harvard grads who can't cook a box of Hamburger Helper even after reading the instructions, or change a tire. Meanwhile, some of the smartest people I ever knew never attended college.

Where's my town? At least St. Louis isn't in the bottom 10. We are once again in the middle of the pack...

Well, let's set these kids loose on our biggest problems. Today.

If getting a college degree is how we measure intellegince then please tell me why my college-educated roommates can't seem to grasp the following brain twisters:

How to properly load a dishwasher.

Proper use of an exhaust fan in the bathroom.

Laundry 101: Use cold water for colors, hot water for whites.

I'll take common sense over a college degree anyday.

Well, snappy and snide comments aside, just remember, this is a rating of American cities - on a world scale we're not doing so hot.

What * said. Seattle, I have noticed, is a city sorely lacking in the knowledge and usage of common sense.

You play the team you field. Worrying doesn't do anything. Today.

Been there, done that. Seattlites definitely seem smarter than people in Miami. A friend of mine had to bail on a date because after 15 min, he still couldn't understand that my friend was a graduate student -- he couldn't understand what a graduate student was! He figured, if you graduated and went to another college, you must be a professor. And if you were in college and not a professor, you must not have ever graduated from college. Could. Not. Understand. I know that's just one example, but I had lots of experiences that suggested people in Miami can't understand anything except looking pretty.

I'm not saying that a college degree means you're smart, but I do think that the two are correlated.

If we're so fucking smart why is the monorail so fucking dead?

Word, ahura. Word.

Well ahura, if we're assuming that having at least a bachelors degree == smart == vote yes on the monorail, then you're already going to lose the initiative vote if only 47% of seattle has a degree.

Yes, there are supid questions. You asked one.

Not that I believe anything you just read or what I'm about to type, but if we look at what this means we see that 53% of seattle was too stupid to get into college and therefor would vote no on the monorail.

All in all, if we use this logic (your logic), the monorail was doomed due to the lack of degrees not due to the abundance of degrees.

Seattle is still more stupid than smart.

In other words, compared to other cities we're smarter, but we're still mostly stupid--if we're saying having at least a bachelors == smart.

Ahura, you said it all.

Being smart won't pay the rent or get the monorail built, but it will put us in debt building sports stadiums we don't want and underwater tunnels we can't afford.

Look at everyone rah rah Ahura as she derails this discussion.

How smart is spending $4.6-11 billion on initial costs for a single line of Monorail that serves West Seattle and Interbay? Not very. Neither is blindly supporting such a plan.

ha ha will failed at math too.

The percentage of US citizens with college degrees is far, far higher than most other nations, so I'll bet being top-ranked in college degrees in the US means you're top-ranked globally.

The US is extremely unusual in the liberalism with with college places are awarded. Even in most developed countries you get weeded out of the college-bound stream when you're 11 or 16 years old, and there's no appealing the decision. If you live in the Third World, you get to go to college if your family is connected to the government or the superrich.

The "community college" is a wholly American concept. Participation in higher education is more widespread in the US than in any other country. The well-reported problems in American education are in the primary and especially secondary schools, where we always rank very low, but that doesn't affect the college-bound, only the non-college-bound. The difference is, in most countries, those students aren't even in what we would consider regular school, but have been directed into a vocational stream from an early age. We have no equivalent of Britain's "O Levels", for instance.

Did we win in Vietnam using college eggheads? NO! Vietnam was won by the brave soldiers who refused the elite ivory-tower path and stood up for America when it counted! Cowardly "Cut and Run" Dems like Murtha & Kerry stayed in their comfy dorm rooms while men with GUTS like Karl Rove & OUR PRESIDENT toughed it out, fighting for Freedom & Democracy! Patriotic cities like Miami may not have the degrees from pinko-indoctrination centers calling themselves universities, but they've got what really counts, the guts to stand up to terrorist countries like Venezuela & Cuba.

IN YOUR FACE, Seattle!

* really there isn't much reason to use hot water ever to wash your clothes--waste of energy for just a placebo effect.

Having once watched a college student "wash" the dishes by squirting liquid soap over them and then running the hot water over them for ten minutes while he sat in the other room and smoked a bong, I second the notion that college and smart are not synonyms.

No one cares how smart you are when they're running to the toilet with diarrhea because of soap in the ice cube trays.

Oh damn, it was the Palm Olive in the ice tray? And i blamed Jalisco!

Almost all my friends from "other cities" have made unsolicited remarks about Seattle being much, much smarter than where they are from. The exceptions seem to be what you would expect - Portland, San Fran, NYC, etc.

I'm not sure of this myself, but could an argument be made that Seattle has been globally influential in arts, business and other enterprises out of proportion with it's actual size? It just seems that way to me.

How "seattle" of us to greet this news with cynicism. If Dallas had come out as the "smartest city" they'd have a parade.

If Dallas had come out as the smartest city, I would have had to question a lot of things before flying down there for the parade.

Wow this touched a few nerves. No one is asserting that all college grads are wonderfull, well-rounded people, or people you agree and share views with, and it certainly isn't reflected in driving prowess, good lord isn't it.

What you Seattle's aren't privey to, however, is 9 out of 10 public conversation you overhear being THE STUPIEST MOTHERFUCKING THING YOU EVER HEARD.

Seriously. There's a whole lot more stupid out there.

Ok, Break! Now that we got the Smoking Ban passed and ended pollution as we know it, and remembered to sign Sound Transit's 10-year anniversary card, let's sub out and get those smart young kids into the game.

Let's make lemonade, coaches. Transportation, Non-Cigarette Pollution, Clean Cars, Deforestation, Habitat Destruction/Fishery Collapse, Health Care. Let's grab a seat and see what the rookies can do.

Can I just state the obvious and say that this poll has at least one obvious bias -- toward medium-sized academic cities? I'm not saying Austin, Omaha, and Columbus aren't smart, fine cities, but if you're basing things on college degrees, and you're including cities that aren't THAT big but have GIANT universities in them, well, duh.

Man, let's dump those losers. Maybe Canada will take us.

re: Longball's point... call the list the Most Educated Cities, then. Don't call it a list of The Smartest Cities. The definition of 'smart' is very subjective. However, the number of citizens with college degrees is not.

Omaha is full of Retardlican Morons.

So if you all are so smart, why can't you merge in traffic? And why is this thread a day old before anyone brings this up.

Since when did we win the Vietnam war?

I guess something to this Smartest and Dumbest cities thing after all.