Skip to footer

Best 10 cities for recent college graduates

Finding a job after college is imperative for many college seniors and some cities offer more career opportunities than others. As we approach graduation season, NerdWallet crunched the numbers to find the best cities in the US for recent college graduates. Can you guess which city came out on top? 

2. Seattle

Jason Redmond/Reuters/File
A passenger on the Bainbridge Island Ferry takes a cell phone photo of the skyline in Seattle. Protected by mountains on three sides and cooled by blasts of fresh ocean air, Seattle, the capital of the Pacific Northwest, is a summer haven for book readers, coffee-drinkers and outdoor adventurers who don't want to stray too far from a good dinner.

  • By Sreekar Jasthi Guest blogger

Population between 20-29: 20.4 percent

Population 25 or older with a Bachelor's degree: 34.5 percent

Median earnings for Bachelor's degree holders: $50,578

Cost of living index: 119.1

Workers with management, business, science or arts jobs: 56.5 percent

Unemployment rate: 6 percent

Overall score: 75.67

Seattle is one of the most educated places in the country—34.5 percent of the city’s population 25 and over hold a Bachelor’s degree, the highest mark of all 50 cities in the study. The top industries in the city include aerospace, information technology, clean technology and healthcare, while the largest employer is the University of Washington, which also produces more graduates than any other college in Seattle.

9 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.