No love for Romantic Willimantic? 
Agree. Some of these campuses are nice (QU for sure and parts of UConn and Eastern) but not the towns.
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Nope. It would need lots more revitalization. Plus it’s got a pretty bad drug problem. Though one of my fav restaurants was there, unfortunately now closed.
My daughter could have edited that article! Worldatlas . com is the site my son started writing for a few years ago, and now he’s gotten jobs there for quite a few of his friends and family members. 
Yes, the kids who write for this site are given assignments at random. They just look stuff up on the internet to come up with lists.
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Are you sure it’s “looking up”? Some of the “facts” are so laughable that they sound made up!!!
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Well, they’re not supposed to be made up, ha. That’s one of my daughter’s jobs, to fact check. But she doesn’t edit all the articles. 
My son said it’s really obvious when one of their writers uses AI for an article. They’re not supposed to rely on it, but I’m sure that some do.
This site always seemed kind of fly-by-night to me, but they’ve paid two of my kids a good bit of money! My son’s articles seem to get a lot of hits.
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I actually quite like New Haven as a small city. Beautiful college town is not how I would try to pitch it, however.
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No, the writer didn’t visit any of these towns. The writer is probably located somewhere like Lebanon.
I hate to say it, but all the CT residents posting here agree. And really no one should be posting about places they have never seen…like this article is doing.
I guess the real question is whether there are any college towns in CT more beautiful than the ones listed in the article?
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West Hartford (UHart and St. Joe’s) and Farmington (Tunxis Community College) are nice. Still not sure I’d designate them as “beautiful,” but they’re more beautiful than the others.
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Tunxis is actually located closer to Bristol than to Farmington, in my opinion.
West Hartford IS nice, and St. Joseph’s and UHart are located there. In addition to a very pretty campus, St. Joseph’s is located very close to Elizabeth Park, which is lovely.
UHart really isn’t close to the center of any of the towns in which it’s located
(Bloomfield, West Hartford, Hartford). IOW, you aren’t walking to any of these town centers from these colleges.
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Willimantic DID have a pretty bad drug problem. Parts of Brooklyn which are now very popular also had a pretty bad drug problems but has now been cleaned up. I wouldn’t say that drugs are gone from Willimantic, but it’s sooo much better than it was 10-15 years ago.
The Prospect Hill neighborhood around Eastern Connecticut is beautiful and is worth a walking tour. It has the largest number of privately owned Victorian houses of any city in the country except San Francisco. Some of them have been bought by the college and are incorporated into the campus. Others are available to students as off campus housing.
Other attraction are Frog Bridge, which is a conversation piece, The Willimantic Farmers’ Market down by the river and the Willimantic Food Co-Op which are must visits for foodies, live music at The River Room on Riverside Drive, at Shaboo Stage, and at The Willimantic Brewing Company. Both the Airline Trail and the Hop River Trail pass through town, providing access to the countryside for hikes and bikes.
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The only places I truly would call “college towns” are Storrs, New Haven, Middletown and New London (ish). I think a college town is one where town/city, in great part, revolves around the college. Many may not agree with those definitions.
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I don’t mind your definition personally, but I do think some people are more literal about the “town” part of “college town”. Of course there is no hard definition of what is a town versus what is a city, but if these people see something as a city, they might not think it really fits their notion of a college town.
Then people will say things like, “Boston is a college town,” but it is possible they mean that more metaphorically than literally.
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Obviously, I agree Boston is clearly not a town, nor is Cambridge, BUT the universities are a HUGE part of the economy and vibe of the place, which makes them “college towns” to me… same with New Haven, if you live there, you will know somebody reliant on Yale for an income…
NYC or LA have lots of universities, but they aren’t part of the city’s identity in the same way, at least not IMO
I definitely know what you mean. In fact I sometimes describe the East End of Pittsburgh as a “college town”, where Pitt, CMU, and a few more colleges are located, due to the same sort of factors.
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Is Palo Alto a college town? Obviously with Stanford right there….. Maybe the criteria is whether it dominates the economy. But as others have pointed out, Boston is definitely a college town, yet I’m sure the universities and colleges don’t dominate the economy.
How about Princeton, NJ? I’m not sure there is much there without the university.
So trying to find a precise definition for “college town” may not be productive. We could just leave it as “towns” (250K or less) that contain a university (or college).
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The click-bait article reads like it was conceived of and written by AI. Why is anyone taking it seriously, other than it mentioned Wesleyan in a positive light and all such mentions get hyped here?
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I just don’t think of New Haven and New London as college towns. Storrs and Middletown, sure.
…and now I’m down the rabbit hole.
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