An organization set up to help consumers and small businesses make financial decisions has released a study that shows in many ways, the state of Utah differs from other states in the country.
Salt Lake City, Provo, Ogden, St. George and Logan were all compared to other cities in the country. According to Wallet Hub these Utah cities have little in common with other U.S. cities similar in size and overall. The areas compared in the study include age, race, household income and educational attainment.
“We found that across the board, it doesn’t similarly look like the makeup of the rest of the country, really in most of the categories that we looked at,” said Jill Gonzalez, a spokesperson for Wallet Hub.
According to Gonzalez, the study was done to see which cities were most “American.”
“Well we really wanted to look into our nation’s identity and kind of break it down metro area by metro area. We did that by parsing through some demographics here,” Gonzalez said. “So characterizes like ethnic makeup, household size, educational attainment and household characteristics really helped us and guided us to see which cities most likely and most closely mimic the rest of the country.”
Although it may sound bad to say our state isn’t very “American,” according to Gonzalez, there are some positives. A large percentage of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher live in Provo, 7% more than the national average of 29%. She said it’s nice to know where your city and metro area ranks and stacks up with the rest of the country.
“I think so many of us, you know, we’re in our little bubble,” Gonzalez said. “We think what is happening around us is what’s happening in the rest of the country and that’s just not the case, no matter where you live.”
Indianapolis, Indiana, Charleston, South Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee were some of the cities that most resembled the U.S. according to the study.