Friday, December 28, 2007

Pittsburgh Can Read; Philly Not So Much

Pittsburgh rates #9 in a list of the country's ten most literate cities. It has been in the top ten since 2003. Criteria used are:

The survey focused on 69 U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or above. Jack Miller of Central Connecticut State University chose six key indicators to rank literacy. These included newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.


Philadelphia came in at #32, which is up a tad from 2006 and 2005.

Let's try to move this number up a little more, Philly. Check out a book or buy some reading material. Or, hey, dust off those credits and finish up that degree.

3 comments:

Greg Palmer said...

That's very interesting, Jane. I'd never even seen that study before, so it's interesting to see the dichotomy between PA's two largest cities. Why do you think there's such a big difference? (Does the 'Burgh have fantastic schools?)

AboveAvgJane said...

Greg,

The link on Philadelphia will take you to the study site which provides the criteria definitions and the rankings of the cities under each criteria. P'burgh ranks higher on booksellers, educational attainment, libraries, newspaper circulation, periodical publishers. Philly outranked it only on Internet resources.

Anonymous said...

But the trend - the trend is good. I know about a study that says that they are what matters but I didn't finish reading it ;)