Los Angeles is the land of UCLA, USC and those brainiacs at Caltech, not to mention President Obama's alma mater Occidental College, the Claremont Colleges, Pepperdine, Loyola Marymount, Cal States ad infinitum, etc. So one might might think that the nation's second-largest metropolitan area would also rank high among American cities with the most college-degree holders.

Wrong again, smog breath: L.A., at 1,595 college degrees per square mile, does not even make the top 10 and comes in at a sad 11 on one blogger's Census-numbers crunching list of smartest U.S. cities (via LA Biz Observed). The number one city (hold your breath)?

San Francisco. Then New York. Then Boston. L.A. even got beat by the southern capital of guidos, Miami. What gives? We'd offer one word: Immigration. The kind of low-wage immigrants attracted to L.A. don't always come equipped with university-bred know-how.

Then again, Phoenix, in the anti-illegal-immigrant state of Arizona, ranks low on the list (with less than a third of L.A.'s per-square-mile degree count: 470).

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