America's Most Literate Cities (Survey, CCU) (home, live, educational)

[Empidonax]

An interesting survey/study that was recently released:

http://www.ccsu.edu/Amlc/Overall_Rankings/Top10.htm

The survey studies and ranks the U.S.'s 69 largest cities (over 250,000 population).

In the top ten are Seattle, Minneapolis, Washington, Atlanta, SF, Denver, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Paul.

In the bottom are: Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Fresno, San Antonio, Bakersfield, Anaheim, Corpus Christi, El Paso, and Stockton.

[mpope409]

And once again, it's another list compiled by a source who doesn't use substantial criteria to present meaningful results.

[astroline95]

i went to central (or CCSU, as it's referred to otherwise) for a year... just moved out of there about a week ago actually, as a geography major with an emphasis in demography (hopefully). the study is definitely legit, although they should indeed list their sources, but i do know that those results are real.

this study isn't recent though, it's from 2005 i think...

[Katarina Witt]

the study is definitely legit, although they should indeed list their sources, but i do know that those results are real.

It is possibly legit (several of my home cities are on the good list), but it would be good to hear what their criteria were.

[mpope409]

The easiest way to make it legit is to do a sample in each city to see what average percentage of the people are readers.

[jonjj]

I would have thought Boston would be way up there. ( I should say higher up than what was listed)

[Katarina Witt]

I know I'm belaboring this point, but what exactly were they measuring? Book sales? Library check-outs? Or something else entirely?

[astroline95]

it says so right on the main page...

"This is the overall ranking for each city. A total score was tallied for each city across six different literacy categories: Booksellers; Educational attainment; Internet Resources; Library Resources; Newspaper Circulation; and Periodical publications. All categories were compared against the city's total population. See "Rank by Category" for more detailed results."


also, very interesting that the top 5 are all pretty much the top 5 for major cities with the highest percentage of gays & lesbians!

[Empidonax]

Just a caveat:

I thought I was posting the most recent results, but apparently the webpage for this yearly survey hasn't been updated. The info I posted is indeed for 2005.

For 2007 I've only been able to find a "top ten"--This year it includes Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Paul, Denver, Washington, St. Louis, SF, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Boston:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20071227/sc_livescience/mostliterateuscitiesminneapolisandseattle (broken link)

If anyone finds the rankings for the 59 remaining cities, it'd be nice to see them....