Greater Boston is easily #1 both per capita and in the aggregate: Ivy Leagues; respectable small, medium, and large private universities; top liberal arts colleges, and specialty art schools.
After that, it comes down to how much weight you give to “elite education” with high-ranking graduate and research programs across the board. I make note of this because the vast majority of “educated” people don’t hold graduate degrees, much less from elite institutions. The Bay Area and Chicagoland are “top heavy,” with Stanford/Cal/UCSF and UChicago/Northwestern, respectively. Neither have any noteworthy liberal arts colleges or “B or B+” institutions.
LA has Caltech, but it’s a small school with areas of specialty; UCLA is a public school with 47,500 students and its graduate business/law/engineering programs are mostly 1B; USC is a top-25 private school with a huge student population (over 49,000), but its graduate programs aren’t elite for the most part; and UCI is a large public school (36,500 students) that was established in 1965, but ranks higher than most other states’ flagship public universities. Pepperdine was, for a while, top-50.
Then there are liberal arts colleges: Pomona, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Soka, Pitzer, Scripps, Occidental, and Thomas Aquinas all in the top 50.
Art/architecture/music: UCLA, USC, CalArts, Art Center, Otis, SCI-Arc, Colburn.
Film: (a lot)
If Yale and Princeton are considered NYC area schools (they are in the CSA, after all), then I’d rank NYC second.
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Last edited by Quixote; Nov 20, 2022 at 9:08 PM.
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