Best college town?

College Confidential Community
21

<p>I’ll rank the college towns I’ve been to (criteria for being a college town: having a significant student population and a significant number of student centered businesses -OR- being home to one of the top 20 or so schools in the country)</p>

<ol>
<li>Charlottesville, VA</li>
<li>Chapel Hill, NC</li>
<li>Austin, TX</li>
<li>Fort Collins, CO</li>
<li>Boulder, CO</li>
<li>Tuscaloosa, AL</li>
<li>Raleigh, NC</li>
<li>Albuquerque, NM</li>
<li>Blacksburg, VA</li>
<li>Durham, NC</li>
</ol>

<p>I include Durham since it is home to Duke University. It could quite possibly be the worst college town in the country. A Duke admissions officer actually told me that “Chapel Hill is where all the students go,” and after seeing Durham, I believe them.</p>

22

<p>The top college towns that I have visited, and I have been to dozens, are:</p>

<p>Ann Arbor
Austin
Boulder
Charlottesville
Madison</p>

<p>Chapel Hill is awesome, but it is too small, same with Ithaca. Gainesville and Bloomington are nice, but not diverse enough. Cambridge is quaint, but it’s really a part of Boston. Berkeley is also nice, but it has some really scary areas. Princeton is boring. New Haven is a slum. Colorado Springs and Palo Alto are too “resortish”.</p>

23

<p>clearly Athens, GA (UGA) is the best college town…and Madison, WI</p>

24

<ol>
<li>Madison</li>
<li>Charlottesville</li>
<li>Ashville</li>
<li>Heidelberg</li>
<li>Eugene</li>
</ol>

25

<p>Evanston, IL
Cambridge, MA</p>

26

<p>Silver, why do you loathe ATL?</p>

27

<p>Ann Arbor is a ho’ ;)</p>

28

<p>According to ePodunk.com, these are popular favorites among the population:</p>

<p>TOP-RANKED COLLEGE TOWNS
BY COMMUNITY SIZE
BIG CITIES
1 Boston-Cambridge, MA
2 Minneapolis, MN
3 Denver, CO
4 Columbus, OH
5 Seattle, WA
6 Atlanta, GA
7 Austin, TX
8 Washington, DC
9 Cincinnati, OH
10 Saint Louis, MO</p>

<p>MEDIUM-SIZED CITIES
1 Columbia, SC
2 Tallahassee, FL
3 Madison, WI
4 Urbana-Champaign, IL
5 Ann Arbor, MI
6 Berkeley, CA
7 Athens, GA
8 Fort Collins, CO
9 New Haven, CT
10 Provo, UT</p>

<p>SMALL CITIES
1 Charlottesville, VA
2 Bozeman, MT
3 Hays, KS
4 Boulder, CO
5 Missoula, MT
6 Manhattan, KS
7 Burlington, VT
8 Bismarck, ND
9 Iowa City, IA
10 Chapel Hill, NC</p>

<p>TOWNS
1 Hanover, NH
2 Princeton, NJ
3 Brookings, SD
4 Middlebury, VT
5 Durango, CO
6 Bronxville, NY
7 Menomonie, WI
8 Oneonta, NY
9 Rolla, MO
10 Conway, SC</p>

29

<p>I always thought a college town was a town that was basically built around one college; like College Station in Pennsylvania.</p>

30

<p>Shravas - College Station in Texas or State College in Pennsylvania?</p>

<p>Either way…both are built around 1 college.</p>

31

<p>Berkeley.</p>

<p>Urban, urbane, and rural. The whole eastern edge is a vast network of regional parks. At night, you can hear owls, coyotes and hyenas howling (I kid you not, there are African hyenas in the Berkeley Hills!)
<a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/supern1254/96029341/[/url]”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/supern1254/96029341/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Great shops (this city of 100,000 residents has better bookstores than all but a handful of all American cities), great food (some of the very best restaurants in the US and great street food, best wine stores in the USA, best grocery store in the USA), great architecture (~400 historic landmarks in a city of 100,000; Greene and Greene, Maybeck, Morgan, Olmstead)
<a href=“http://thomashawk.com/hello/209/1017/1024/Berkeley%20Early%20Evening%2C%20%232.jpg[/url]”>http://thomashawk.com/hello/209/1017/1024/Berkeley%20Early%20Evening%2C%20%232.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Breathtaking bay views, gorgeous sunsets.
<a href=“http://www.posicorp.com/pictures/2004-11-20%20UC%20Berkeley%20-%20The%20Big%20Game/IMG_0001.jpg[/url]”>http://www.posicorp.com/pictures/2004-11-20%20UC%20Berkeley%20-%20The%20Big%20Game/IMG_0001.jpg&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/~xli/SLi_Homepage/Pix/Bay_area/LBNL_006.JPG[/url]”>http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/~xli/SLi_Homepage/Pix/Bay_area/LBNL_006.JPG&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/itinerant/34467921/[/url]”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/itinerant/34467921/&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/goodlux/5717390/[/url]”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/goodlux/5717390/&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://static.■■■■■■■■■■/26/53305067_5174a8b4fa_b.jpg[/url]”>http://static.■■■■■■■■■■/26/53305067_5174a8b4fa_b.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Beautiful parks (Rose Garden, Botanical Gardens), dozens of hidden stairways and green paths, amazingly unique diversity of flora.
<a href=“http://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/pbo31/sets/72057594073584361/[/url]”>http://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/pbo31/sets/72057594073584361/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>And the scary part of town Alexandre was referring to:
<a href=“http://static.■■■■■■■■■■/33/45712609_b634b28ba9.jpg[/url]”>http://static.■■■■■■■■■■/33/45712609_b634b28ba9.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

32

<p>Charlottesville, Virgina</p>

33

<p>I second NYC. My definition of the best college town is the town in which you’d most like to go to school, and then for me, hands down, it’s NYC. I don’t think it’s possible to compare the opportunities for recreation, culture, and job/career opportunities in NYC to those of any other city. The only possible exception is if you like to hike or mountain climb or something outdoorsy, but even then there are places just out of the city for that.</p>

34

<p>Chicago and San Francisco are on par with NYC, but none of those qualify as college towns. A college town, by definition, is a town that’s influenced and shaped by a university.</p>

35

<p>OK…in that case NYU OWNS lower Manhattan. And West Harlem is based around Columbia.</p>

<p>bing which college are you going to in NYC?</p>

36

<p>seattle or san francisco</p>

37

<p>Here is a list of the best college towns, out of those I’ve been to (which, not to brag, includes almost all of them). Colleges and towns are listed, because colleges are located in different areas of each city - for example, NYU is in a good college town but Columbia is in a remote, boring one.</p>

<p>Out of these, I’d say Madison takes the cake.</p>

<p>East
Greenwich Village/Union Sq.-NYU, Parsons, New School, others
Downtown New Haven-Yale
Northampton-Smith College
Kenmore Sq.-BU
Burlington-UVM</p>

<p>South
Auburn-Auburn
Athens-UGA
Charlottesville-UVA
Chapel Hill-UNC (I think this one is a bit overrated, but it deserves to be here nonetheless, if only for the chocolate pecan pie at MD’s).
Charleston and Savannah-SCAD/Col of Charleston (these are a stretch, but the towns are so cool to walk around that I had to include them).</p>

<p>West
Westwood-UCLA
Bozeman-Montana
Boulder-Colorado
Austin-UT-Austin</p>

<p>Midwest
Madison-UW
Ann Arbor-UM
Columbus-Ohio State (underrated)</p>

38

<p>P.S. Iowa City should probably be on my list.</p>

39

<p>I disagree about Columbia vs NYU, at least Columbia has a campus, while NYU doesn’t, and the area around C.U. has considerably gentrified. It’s close to the river and a few blocks from central park.</p>

<p>I wouldn’t pick Westwood either out of So Cal, UCSB for example is better. UCLA is in too much of a car-based environment, which kind of goes counter to the concept of the college town.</p>

40

<p>Tuscaloosa>Auburn</p>