The Best Cities for New College Grads

July 3, 2008— -- Houston, Dallas and Austin nabbed the top three spots on our list of best cities for recent college grads. Spurred by low costs of living and booming energy and tech industries, these metro areas have a lot to offer new professionals seeking a home.

This includes high starting salaries. At $44,100, Houston's average starting salary for those with bachelor's degrees is the second-highest in the nation, behind only San Francisco, No. 10 on our list. The average starting salary in Dallas is $41,000; in Austin it's $38,700.

Click here to learn more about the best cities for college grads at our partner site, Forbes.com.

"Their economy is generally booming, but especially because of oil and gas," says Al Lee, quantitative analysis director for salary information Web site Payscale.com of Houston. "That pulls up the overall pay scale."

Atlanta, Seattle, Charlotte, N.C., and Denver also made the list.

To compile the list, we looked at the country's 40 largest metro areas and examined average starting salaries with information from Payscale.com; cost of living from the Council for Community and Economic Research; percent of adult population with college degrees and percent of population in their 20s from the U.S. Census's 2006 American Communities Survey; and expected 2008 job-growth figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We double-weighted the starting-salary and job-growth figures.

These factors are important. With the average college graduate leaving school with nearly $19,000 in debt, a city's economic situation should be a pretty big factor in deciding where to move.

Washington, D.C., No. 9 on our list, has some of the nation's highest costs of living, but the high starting salaries and job growth offset that.

Salt Lake City offers decent starting salaries and enviable job growth, but its low population of 20-somethings keeps it out of the top 10. Cleveland, on the other hand, could offer free gas to entice new residents and it probably wouldn't make a difference. The city offers below-average starting salaries to new college grads and negative job growth.