There are some surprises in the data. Both as cities and metro areas, St. Louis and Kansas City are both more educated than New York and Chicago, and Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleveland and Tampa all outperform Los Angeles. The overall pattern is that the coasts, the plains and the Midwest all perform quite well, with the South notably less educated than the rest of the country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...erica/?hpid=z3
Detroit also doesn't perform that much worse than yuppie magnets like NYC and Chicago, on a strictly central city comparison, according to the chart in the article: