01:46 PM PDT on Monday, June 12, 2006

By ANTONIA GIEDWOYN, kgw.com Staff

You may have already guessed it – perhaps you’ve noticed a suspiciously high number of Portland coffee shop dwellers studying Foucault while sipping their lattes. Now it’s official: Portland ranked among the top 10 brainiest U.S. cities, according to a new survey.

KGW photo

Downtown Portland.

And Portland’s apparently smarter sibling, Seattle, placed first.

The survey , conducted by Bizjournals.com , based their results on an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

Seattle has the highest proportion of college-educated residents in any “big” city; 47 percent of Seattle adults graduated from college. Close to 20 percent earned a graduate and/or professional degree.

Portland ranked 9th most educated on the list. Almost 33 percent of Portland residents are college graduates and of those, 11.4 percent advanced to earn a graduate and/or professional degree.

Portland’s percentage of high school dropouts ranked sixth lowest out of the 53 large communities ranked in the study.

The order of the top 10 are as follows: Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Colorado Springs, Minneapolis, Charlotte, San Diego, Washington, Portland and Albuquerque.

Cities like Miami, Cleveland and Detroit lag behind in the brainpower list.

The study determined that Miami has the lowest brainpower rating of any large community in America. Two-thirds of its adults never went to college and nearly half never graduated from high school.

The U.S. average of residents who hold bachelor's degrees is about 25 percent.

The study analyzed the educational levels of adults in approximately 16,000 cities and towns.