Rolla, home of the Missouri University of Science & Technology, ranked nineteenth on the list of the top one hundred smartest cities in America. St. Louis did not make the list, but Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, both placed eighty-fifth. The list was based on Lumosity test results. San Francisco-based Lumosity creates brain-training exercises and collected data from more than three million people in the U.S. who played those online brain games. Most of the cities that placed in the top one hundred are considered “college towns”.Most of the top metro areas contain major research universities, suggesting education is an important predictor of cognitive performance.

Abigail Williams, senior at MS&T, feels that the university helps her expand her horizons.

“I originally started at Park University which is in Kansas City, where I’m from. I got offered a full ride scholarship to go there, and a year and a half into it I realized I wasn’t happy with the program. It wasn’t challenging. It just wasn’t what I wanted in a school.” Williams said.

Williams says MS&T is better than her previous school, because it is more challenging. The professors are more knowledgeable, and it is a bigger school.

“Comparing the school that I came from, which there I got offered a full-ride scholarship, I gave that up, having completely free college, to come to a school that had better education.” Williams said.

MS&T is mainly an engineering school, which means the students who attend are most likely pretty strong in math and science.

“People who are educated in fine arts as far as music or doing painting in general, you can’t really have a test for that. So they might excel and be very knowledgeable in that field, but that’s not something that they’re getting tested on. Whereas here in Rolla, the students that come here are good at math and science, and have to be able to write well. So, I guess they have the general background knowledge that maybe they’re testing on.” Williams said.

After graduation, Williams plans to attend graduate school in Southern Mississippi. She enjoys doing research and expanding her knowledge in a place where people are driven like her.

Economists and urban researchers tend to analyze the collective intelligence of cities based on socioeconomic variables such as income and education levels. Last year, however, Lumosity published its first Smartest Cities rankings based on our own database of users’ performance of cognitive training exercises. As stated earlier, the top cities are mostly college towns. Lumosity seems to think that people who value education perform the best on their tests.