Best college town?

College Confidential Community
41

<p>Chapel Hill…everything’s about UNC-CH…even the sky is cooperatively Carolina Blue. :)</p>

42

<p>San Francisco</p>

43

<p>Easily Austin, Texas…</p>

44

<p>Newark, DE - Univ. of Delaware</p>

45

<p>Other than Cal, can you tell me what major university or college is located within 10-15 miles of San Francisco? San Francisco is one of the only major cities not to have several top universities in or around it.</p>

<p>Boston:
Boston College
Boston University
Brandeis University
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tufts University
Wellesley College</p>

<p>Chicago:
Loyola University
Northwestern University
University of Chicago
University of Illinois-Chicago</p>

<p>Los Angeles:
California Institute of Technology
University of California-Los Angeles
University of Southern California</p>

<p>New York:
Barnard College
Columbia University
Fordham University
New York University</p>

<p>Philadelphia:
Bryn Mawr College
Haverford College
Swarthmore College
University of Pennsylvania</p>

46

<p>Stanford is in the bay area close to San Francisco</p>

47

<p>South Park :)</p>

48

<p>Alexandre,</p>

<p>I don’t really see the point of listing big cities with multiple top schools.
The worst example is Los Angeles, the city I live in, for two obvious reasons:

  1. according to census, LA has one of the lowest % of people with a college degree (25%). The percentage is even lower if you include the illegal immigrants. On top of this is the Hollywood culture/entertainment business; there’s a reason why it feels almost anti-intellectual in LA!
  2. LA is extremely car-oriented. If you don’t have a car, your mobility is limited and you’d definitely feel it. On the other hand, it’s not cheap to keep a car in LA; parking can be an issue since this is not some small city/college town where one can find parking space easily.</p>
49

<p>Wooo! Here’s another for Poughkeepsie. Now THAT’S a college town, hahaha.</p>

50

<p>aerableprable, Stanford is almost 35 miles (45 minutes drive) from San Francisco. </p>

<p>Sam Lee, I totally agree. I was merely saying that major cities AREN"T and CANNOT be considered “college towns”. If fewer than 25% of the population isn’t associated to colleges, then it is not a college town. Take Madison as an example. Total population is roughly 200,000. Of those, 60,000 are either students at UW or employed by UW. Furthermore, the rest of the population in Madison are on good terms with the university. That’s a college town. Same goes for Ann Arbor, Athens, Berkeley, Boulder, Chapel Hill, Charlottesville and several other college towns. Austin and Boston are probably the only two cities with populations over 500,000 that loosely qualify as college towns.</p>

<p>Cities like Chicago, SF, NY and LA hardly qualify as college towns.</p>

51

<p>Alexandre, that statistic simply doesn’t work, because of the way city boundaries are drawn in the United States. Some cities cover just a few square miles while others cover hundreds. </p>

<p>Say you had City A, of 50,000 people, whose municipal boundaries only cover 5 square miles. Assume that other towns and cities in the 100 square miles surrounding City A have a population of 500,000 people. Compare this with City B, which looks absolutely identical, except its municipal boundaries extend out to cover 100 square miles. City B has a total population of 550,000 (of whom 50,000 live within the central area of 5 square miles). Although City A might have a college population of 20,000 in the central 5 square miles, and City B might have a college population of 40,000 in the central 5 square miles, only City A would fit your criteria. </p>

<p>This is just an illustrative example - it is usually far more nuanced than that and what makes a good college town is more a matter of where a college is located (and how that affects social life, including the extent to which students are “sucked” off of the campus on weekends), not what city it is in.</p>

<p>Bottom line is that technicalities or statistics don’t make college towns, college towns make college towns. See <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/2460128-post37.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/2460128-post37.html&lt;/a&gt; for my list.</p>

52

<p>posterX,</p>

<p>i can tell you Evanston (northwestern) is a better college town than Westwood (UCLA). downtown evanston has more stores, restuarants…etc than westwood. evanston downtown has multiple bookstores while i don’t recall seeing one in westwood. when you see bentley, mercedes constantly running through westwood and traffic getting ridiculous there during rush hour because the traffic isn’t moving on wilshire blvd, u know it is more a part of LA, rather than just a college town (technically, westwood is just one of the LA neigborhoods; it’s not a separate town).</p>

53

<p>Alexandre,</p>

<p>We share similar view of what a typical college town is. To me, I consider Cambridge, but not Boston, as a college town. I spent a lot of time in Boston before, including one summer. I just didn’t feel life revolves around colleges in Boston. I could feel the strong presence of Harvard in Cambridge, however.</p>

54

<p>I like Evanston too, but I was creating a list by region. I’ve been to Evanston many times and don’t consider it to be one of the best college towns in the Midwest.</p>

55

<p>i think another good indicator for whether it’s a college town or not is the sports section of the local newspaper. in places like ann arbor and madison, you will see a lot of coverage on wolverines and badgers, even when the teams don’t do well. whereas in boston, the boston globe probably has at most 2 pieces covering the havard/yale game. it’s mostly about the celtics, red sox, and patriots.</p>

56

<p>Why do these innocent questions always devolve into nit picky arguments?</p>

<p>I don’t know if it’s the best, but I’ll throw in for Ithaca, NY, with both Ithaca College and Cornell. Nowhere else has massive waterfalls you can swim under right in town, the only seat of the Dalai Lama in north America, a funky population that created its own money and elected the only communist mayor in the US, and overall probably the most quintessential isolated collegetown experience one could imagine in absolutely gorgeous wine country with gorges running everywhere.</p>

57

<p>“Why do these innocent questions always devolve into nit picky arguments?”</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/images/ccclogotmp-p.gif[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/images/ccclogotmp-p.gif&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

58

<p>Cities like Chicago, NYC, Philly, LA, etc. are not “college towns”.</p>

<p>My vote would go to Madison.</p>