The 13 Best Cities For Brand New College Grads

For people in their mid twenties to early thirties, who have finished their educations and are starting their careers, figuring out where to live can be very difficult.

Local economies vary from place to place, recent grads might be looking for a partner to start a family, and it's good to be around other people in your age range.

To try to figure out where newly minted young professionals should live, we evaluated the 200 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. on a variety of measures that might be important to recent grads.

We used six measures to evaluate the 200 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. From the Census Bureau's 2012 American Community Survey, we took the share of the population of each city that were young adults between the ages of 20 and 34, the percent of people who had never been married as a proxy for single people, the share of the population with a bachelor's degree or higher, the median earnings for a worker in the city, and the percentage of rental households that paid less than 35% of monthly income on housing expenses as a measure of apartment affordability. We also took the March 2014 unemployment figures for each from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Local Area Unemployment Statistics.

Each city was given a ranking score from 0-100 for each of these measures, and then those rankings were averaged together to find the final ranking.