Best Cities to Start a Career

Aug. 5, 2009— -- Ask any recent grad if he'd move for a job, and chances are he'd say yes. After all, with unemployment at 9.5%, many would rather cross state lines than move in with mom and dad.

First-time job seekers would be wise to consider San Jose, Calif., Cambridge, Mass., and Houston, Texas, among the nation's best places to begin a career. These metros are home to America's strongest big and small companies, and attract the country's most talented professionals, based on our analysis.

Recent grads desiring an equally dynamic area with fewer than one million people might head to Bridgeport, Conn., or Madison, Wisc. Looking for less than 500,000 residents? Ann Arbor, Mich., Boulder, Colo., and Santa Barbara, Calif., are strong options.

Click here to learn about the best places to begin a career at our partner site, Forbes.com.

In compiling this list, we considered 350 of the country's metropolitan statistical areas (MSA), and in cases where they were not available, Metropolitan Divisions (MDs); both are geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OBM) for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics to form our list. For some of the country's largest metros (such as New York, the Bay Area and Chicagoland), the OBM breaks combined MSAs into MDs. That allows us to track San Jose (metro population 1.8 million) as not simply a part of San Francisco, and Newark, N.J. (metro population 2.1 million) as something separate than New York City.

No two places overlapped, and all data used for evaluation conform to the same geographic boundaries. All measurements were adjusted for population--that way big cities and small cities could compete. We then ranked cities by population, providing the top twenty metros for cities over one million and the top five for cities with populations between 500,000 and one million and for those metros under 500,000.