FILE PHOTO: brain. Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash
SALT LAKE CITY – Utah is home to some of the cleverest people in the United States.
That’s not the somewhat biased opinion of your grandmother, but rather of that of experts at the free online education platform Guru99.com.
Recent studies by those experts analyzed six metrics – including average Intelligence Quotient (IQ) statistics; graduation rates; average scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT); percentage of the population without a high school diploma or General Educational Development (GED) certificate; Gross Domestic Product per capita; and the percentage of the population with low literacy rates – to rank U.S. states by intelligence.
Those metrics were given a score out of ten, then combined to be a total score out of 60, according to Krishna Rungta, the founder and CEO of Guru99.com.
Utah came out as Number 10 on that ranking, with an overall intelligence score of 52.21.
The Beehive State trailed after New Hampshire (with an intelligence score of 56.82), Minnesota (55.82), Wyoming (54.98), Vermont (54.91), Montana (54.64), North Dakota (54.38), Maine (53.83), South Dakota (52.61) and Wisconsin (52.45). Idaho is ranked 28th with a score of 46.79.
That ranking was based on Utah’s average IQ of 101.5; average SAT score of 1233; and graduation rate of 93.17 percent, exceeding the national average of 90.96 percent.The educational analysts at Guru99.com also based that ranking on Utah’s low literacy rate of only 14.5 percent, also below the national average of 19 percent.
At the other end of the “smarts” spectrum were the states of Louisiana (with an intelligence score of 42.4), West Virginia (42.4), Mississippi (41.678), Texas (41.46) and New Mexico (40.52).
Rungta attributes much of Utah’s standing on the Guru99 ranking to the strength of its secondary and post-secondary educational systems.
“Education in the United States is the cornerstone of individual empowerment and society progress,” he emphasizes. “It is a dynamic force that imparts knowledge, shapes character, cultivates critical thinking and ignites the flames of curiosity.”
There are 429 high schools in Utah, made up of 365 public schools and 64 private schools, with a total enrollment of about 675,000 students.
With a graduation rate of about 88 percent, those secondary schools feed the Utah System of Higher Education, which includes 16 colleges, universities and technical colleges. In the realm of for-profit institutions, Utah can also boast of another 20 universities and colleges.
The combined enrollment in these institutions regularly exceeds 200,000 students.
As of January of this year, about 93 percent of Utah adults aged 25 and over were high school graduates or higher and 37.9 percent had a bachelor’s or advanced degree.
Smartness is easy to quantify, Rungta explains, but that does not measure the full spectrum of talents and skills that every person can learn across a broad range of topics.
“Even after college,” he adds, “the internet has opened up a vast array of opportunities for growth and development that could progress careers further, enable people to learn new skills and discover new passions.”
For additional information about this study, please go online to https://www.guru99.com
Based in India, Guru99.com is an online service that strives to make quality education affordable to the masses by removing financial barriers to learning.