In the New Geography, Joel Kotkin reports that America’s college graduates are increasingly found outside the dominant metro areas.

…The New York Times recently opined that “college graduates gravitate to places with many other college graduates and the atmosphere that creates.”

Yet an analysis of Census data shared with Forbes by demographer Wendell Cox tells a different story. In the past decade, the metropolitan areas that have enjoyed the fastest growth in their college-educated populations have not been the places known as hip, intellectual hotbeds.

The study looked at the change in the number of people with bachelor’s degrees in the nation’s 51 largest metros. (Click through to see the findings. You might be surprised.)

…the pattern is clear: brainpower is spreading out. The notion that companies seeking skilled labor have to go to one of the “hip” cities — an idea relentlessly marketed by the New York and D.C.-based press — appears greatly overstated. In reality, skilled, college-educated people are increasingly now scattered throughout the country, and often not where you’d expect them. For example, Charlotte, N.C., Columbus, Ohio, Kansas City and Atlanta now boast about the same per capita number of college grads as Portland and Chicago, and have higher per capita concentrations of grads over the age of 25 than Los Angeles.

These trends also suggest that, in many ways, the highly educated are not so different from Americans who never went to college or never graduated. The factors that have driven economic outperformance by some cities over the past decade — lower home prices, better business climate, job opportunities — also attract people with bachelor’s degrees.

Kotkin says that the dispersion of intellectual talent is good for the U.S. overall, which is clearly true. It also means that places like the Puget Sound region, which have enjoyed a reputation for highly-educated talent, cannot take their position for granted.

Good additional commentary at BusinessClimate.com .