The 20 best cities for college grads looking to start their lives

The Class of 2019 is getting ready to begin their post-college lives.

We found a set of US cities with large and thriving populations of recent college grads and young adults.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The Class of 2019 is getting ready to begin their post-college lives, and many new graduates are deciding where to start their careers and their lives.

We put together a list of 20 US cities with large and thriving populations of recent college grads.

We looked at five indicators in each of the 260 metropolitan areas for which data was available: size of the young-adult population, share of young adults with at least a bachelor's degree, the unemployment rate among young adults, median earnings among young adults, and the cost of living relative to the national average.

Read about the details of our ranking method and list of sources here.

Many of the metro areas on the list are home to large universities, as such cities tend to have younger and more highly educated populations. Several major business and tech hubs appear on the ranking as well.

Here are the 20 best cities for recent college grads: