Did you know...
- Competition among the country's top universities is so fierce that they are forced to turn away high-performing prospective students. Harvard and Stanford, for instance, turned away a full half of their applicants who scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT. You don't have to worry about them, though. They got in elsewhere.
- Where are the most-learned people in America? According to a 2019 WalletHub study, the most educated city in America was Ann Arbor, Michigan. The San Jose and Washington, D.C. metro areas followed closely behind. The least educated city, according to the study, was Visalia, California—in between Fresno and Bakersfield.
- Did you know that illiteracy and crime are correlated? One study found that up to two-thirds of students who could not read with proficiency by the end of 4th grade ended up on welfare or in jail. One of the most effective anti-crime efforts is to fund quality educational programs.
- Boston has the highest concentration of higher ed institutions in the nation. There are over 100 colleges and universities in the Greater Boston area. It also has seven R1 "very high research activity" universities: Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Brandeis, Boston College, Northeastern, and Tufts. This R1 concentration, too, is a record.
- Teaching is a hard job, and when compared to other industrialized nations, American teacher pay is middle-of-the-pack. Maybe that’s what explains a University of Pennsylvania study that found a third of teachers quit the profession within the first 3 years. When you extend the time frame to five years, 46% leave.