By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

In this difficult recovery, many of the strongest local economies have been those with a high share of educated people in their workforce, particularly areas where technology companies and other knowledge-based industries are growing most rapidly.

To determine the metro areas that are gaining brainpower in the 21st Century, we scored the nation’s 380 metropolitan statistical areas based on three criteria. We started with the growth rate in the number of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree from 2000 through 2013 (25% weighting in final score). But since the places that post the highest growth rates tend to be those starting with low levels of educational attainment, we gave greater weight to the percentage point increase in the share of the population that is college-educated over that span (50%), and we factored in the share of educated people in the population in 2013 (25%). We also separated out results for the 51 MSAs with over a million residents.

For the most part, the top 10 on our list of the 51 largest metro areas is dominated by places with large concentrations of colleges, and those that long ago made the transition from industrial to information-based economies.

In the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metro area, 44.8% of the population has bachelor’s degrees or above, the fourth-highest concentration of brainpower in the nation, up 7.8 percentage points since 2000 on the strength of a 32.2% jump in its college-educated population. That places Boston No. 1 on our large cities list.

It’s followed in second place by Pittsburgh, which logged the largest percentage point increase since 2000 in the proportion of its population that is college-educated, 8.8 points, to 32.2%, on the strength of 37.3% growth in raw numbers.

Perhaps the biggest driver in increasing the concentration of educated people in a population lies in the composition of local industry. Silicon Valley has done very well, making heavy additions to an already high concentration of educated residents. The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area places third on our list with a population in which 46.7% hold a bachelor’s degree or above, the second highest share in the nation, a 6.8 percentage point jump over 2000. Its urban annex, San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, places eighth, with a population that is 45.2% college-educated, an increase of 6.4 percentage points. To some extent, this reflects the area’s deindustrialization and high price structure; you do not want to come to the Bay Area today without a high-paying job requiring a good college degree if you expect to live a middle-class lifestyle.

Another big employer of educated people is government, and with Washington in expansion mode over the past decade, it’s no surprise that our nation’s capital features in the top 10 — twice. The proportion of the population of Washington-Alexandria-Arlington that is college-educated has risen 6.2 points to 48.7%, the highest concentration in the nation, on the back of a 45% increase in the raw numbers. It ranks fifth on our list, followed in sixth place by neighboring Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, Md.

Full List: America’s Smartest Cities

The Small Smart Set

Looking at the full set of the nation’s 380 metropolitan areas, the 51 biggest added far more people to their college-educated populations than the other 329 — a net 12 million since 2000, compared to 4.8 million for the smaller metro areas. But the growth rates were actually fairly similar, 43% vs. 41%, which highlights that the largest cities are no longer the only places attracting educated workers.

Some of the most dramatic growth is taking place in two kinds of small-scale geographies: college towns and what might be best described as amenity regions. At the turn of the millennium, college towns already had a decent base of educated people; now they seem able to attract and nurture tech companies as well. This is the case for the second-ranked metro area on our overall list of all 380: Bloomington, Indiana. Home to Indiana University, the metro area has logged a dramatic 11.7 percentage point increase in the proportion of its population that is college educated since 2000. The share of its population with BAs is now 40.6%, putting it in range of places like Boston and the Bay Area.

Much the same pattern can be seen in several college towns, including No. 4 Auburn-Opelika, Ala.; Hattiesburg, Miss. (sixth); Lawrence, Kan. (seventh), and Burlington, Vt. (10th). The other big growth areas are attractive small towns that have lured many down-shifting, but often well educated, boomers. Placing first on our overall list is St. George, Utah — its college-educated population increased by 167% from 2000 through 2013, making for a hefty 11.1 percentage point jump in the proportion of its population that’s college educated to 32.0%. Other areas with similar patterns of growth include Ocean City, N.J. (third), Wilmington, N.C. (fifth), Asheville, N.C. (eighth), and Redmond-Bend, Ore. (ninth).

Looking Forward

The rapid growth in the concentration of residents with bachelor’s degrees in these smaller cities suggests that the geography of brainpower is likely to change in the years ahead. For decades the Southeast and Midwest have lagged behind the Northeast and the West Coast in education, but this gap is closing somewhat, at least in the smaller cities. Save Burlington, Vt., not one small metro area in the Northeast or California ranked within the top 65 of our overall list.

A plethora of places in the Southeast dot the top part of our overall list: in addition to the previously mentioned Wilmington and Asheville, Durham-Chapel Hill (15th); Charleston-North Charleston, S.C. (17th); and Savannah, Ga. (20th). The Intermountain West is well represented as well in addition to St. George, with Boulder, Colo., in 13th place, and Provo-Orem, Utah, in 22nd. These areas are all likely to emerge as top tech and professional centers as their ranks of educated workers swell.

An equally compelling view of the future would be to concentrate on the locations of relatively recent college graduates. A recent study by Richey Piiparinen and Jim Russell for Cleveland State University looked at college-educated people between the ages of 25 and 34 in 2011-13. It found that many of the metro areas with the most rapid growth of this population were in the South, led by Nashville, Tenn., Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, Fla.; and Austin, Texas, all of which experienced growth in this cohort of between 15% and 25%.

More surprising, however, was the strong growth in some Rust Belt cities, including Cleveland-Elyria (+20%), and Pittsburgh (12%). Piiparinen and Russell suggest this is, in part, due to the lower costs in these regions, which allow young people to live far better than they would in a pricier city on either coast. Clearly high costs could shift the nature of future educated migration. It already has caused millennial populations to stagnate in some traditional magnet cities for the educated, such as New York and San Francisco, and actually drop in the core areas of Chicago and Portland. Another factor could be the availability of high-paying jobs; Portland, for example, has an inordinate proportion of college-educated young residents working at lower wages than the national average. In contrast Houston, where high-paying jobs are being created at a healthy clip, the young educated cohort grew five times as fast.

Full List: America’s Smartest Cities

Of course many factors could shift this geography of education in the years ahead. An extended slide in oil prices, for example, could slow growth in places like Houston and Dallas, while a shift in the terrain of social media could have a devastating effect on the Bay Area. Yet looking ahead, it’s clear that the map of America’s brainpower is likely to continue changing. The leaders, particularly talent-producers such as Boston, should remain at the top for years to come, but other regions — notably the South, the Intermountain West and perhaps also the Rust Belt — could be making bigger gains in the years ahead.

Mark Schill is an economic development strategy and community process consultant with Praxis Strategy Group.