Forbes recently ran their 10 best and 10 worst cities for education. You’ll never guess what the cities at the top of the rankings have in common?  They have a major university that graduates thousands of fresh minds each year and they have industries that require brain power located in these communities creating jobs for graduates.

On the flip side the least educated communities (two of the top 10 are located here in AZ) suffer from low wages and high unemployment.

I am all for university spending. The UofA is a major economic engine in our community.  We’ve had some great wins including the Phoenix Mars project (a recently completed mission with a budget of $452 million that trickled in to our community and put us on the astrological map.) The problem I have is that the tax payers of Arizona are making major commitments to higher education but we are loosing our students in droves because there is no future for them here in Tucson.

Read the Forbes article - HERE.

The most-educated city in America: Boulder, Colo., home to the University of Colorado with high-tech employers like IBM  and Sun Microsystems  to keep alumni in the area after they graduate.

Other college cities topping the list are Ann Arbor, Mich., home to the University of Michigan; Charlottesville, Va., with the University of Virginia; Durham, N.C., with Duke University; and Fort-Collins, Colo., home to Colorado State.

University jobs, research parks and tech companies pay solid salaries. The average income for the 10 best-educated cities is $35,000. In the 10 least-educated cities, by contrast, the average income is $19,000.

The best-educated cities are some of the wealthiest, like the southern Connecticut metropolitan area. While home to the troubled city of Bridgeport, the surrounding suburbs are home to hedge funds and the well-to-do from New York. San Jose and San Francisco, among the wealthiest cities in the country, are also the fourth and fifth best-educated on this list.

The absence of education can leave a troubled region in deeper trouble. In Yuma, Ariz.–the sixth least-educated area in America–unemployment has soared above 20%, one of only two metropolitan areas in the country with so many jobless.

Is it the graduates that create the jobs, or the jobs that create the graduates? Durham, N.C., yields some clues. In the 1950s, universities and the government invested heavily to build a large research park to attract better jobs to the region. Over decades, the investment paid off richly, with the Research Triangle Park employing some 40,000 workers, many of them well-educated and high-paid, according to the Durham Chamber of Commerce.

Now for the rankings of the 10 worst -

No. 1 Lake Havasu, Ariz.*

Lake Havasu City-Kingman, Ariz., MSA

Adult population: 137,401
Bachelor’s degrees: 10,577 (8%)
Master’s degrees: 3,282 (2%)
Professional degrees: 791 (.6%)
Doctorates: 1,167 (.8%)

Lake Havasu City is perhaps best known as the site where, in the 1970s, the London Bridge was relocated after being disassembled piece by piece and transported across the Atlantic. As brilliant as the idea was, it didn’t take many diplomas to pull off. Barely 10% of the adults in the Lake Havasu metro area have a bachelor’s degree or more.

* Least educated.

No. 6 Yuma, Ariz.

Yuma, Ariz., MSA

Adult population: 117,204
Bachelor’s degrees: 9,879 (8%)
Master’s degrees: 4,704 (4%)
Professional degrees: 1,141 (1%)
Doctorates: 399 (.3%)

Not many college graduates settle in the border town of Yuma. The city’s crippling job shortage can’t help. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that in September, Yuma and El Centro, Calif., were the only two cities in the country with unemployment rates of more than 20%.