Boston Ranked Seventh On Most Educated Cities List

BOSTON, MA —Boston has earned a top spot on this year’s list of most educated cities in America, ranking first for the share of people 25 or older with a graduate or professional degree; sixth for the share of adults with a bachelor’s degree; and 17th for the share of adults with some college education.

That’s according to a recent report from WalletHub. Overall, Boston ranks seventh among the nation’s most educated cities.

But while the city ranks near the top for higher education, its scores for public education for grades K through 12 tell a different story. It ranks 107th out of 150 for quality of public education and 87th for the number of summer learning opportunities per capita, essentially meaning the number of summer camps.

Boston City Councilor Annissa Essaibi-George, the chair of the city’s Education Committee, said that the state’s underfunding of Boston public schools is a contributing factor.

“Because of the various impacts of the cycle of poverty, low-income students need more school support if they are to be academically on par with their peers and if we are ever to break the cycle of poverty,” she said in an email to Patch. “The State’s decades-long underfunding of public education has meant BPS has not had adequate funding to handle building maintenance, staffing and students supports, and programmatic resources to have a high quality education at every school.”

Boston also ranks in the lower 50 percent for education gaps among the races; the number of Black people in Boston with bachelor’s degrees was 10.2 percentage points less than white people.

Laura Dziorny is the deputy director of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, located in Boston. She said reconsidering how children are taught is crucial.

“To begin dismantling the structures that reinforce these disparities, we must rethink how we approach teaching and learning,” she said in an email to Patch. “How can we learn with and from local communities to provide an equitable, high-quality learning environment for all students?”

She said the organization works to improve equity in education: one of its latest initiatives is “Campus without Walls,” a program that would provide students with education opportunities that “go beyond the limits” of a traditional school day.

Massachusetts ranks as the most educated state in the country in a January report released by WalletHub. It also placed first in the two subcategories: educational attainment, which measures things like the percentage of adults with degrees, and quality of education, which accounts for disparities, learning opportunities, and quality of the public school system. Massachusetts has the highest percentage of bachelor’s degree holders and the second-highest average university quality.