The college towns I’m most familiar with are Charlottesville, VA (University of Virginia accounts for roughly half of the 40,000 population) and College Park, MD (The total population, 24,000, is smaller than the total number of students, faculty and staff of the University of Maryland, but most of them live outside the city limits).
Seattle and Washington DC have neighborhoods that I call college towns, but technically, they aren’t.
I’m really not sure what this is supposed to mean. Can you clarify?
Otherwise, my current city of Sherbrooke is generally considered a college town due to the presence of two universities, one of which is a relatively large (and well-rated) research university. The university isn’t the only industry here, maybe not even the largest, but it strongly influences the city’s culture.
I’m not sure I’d personally agree with the description or not, but a lot of people will even refer to cities as large as Boston as “college towns.”
When you can actually see the name of your small town ranked in college football, then you know you are a college town. Auburn, Alabama is the prettiest college town I’ve ever seen – especially in the spring.
If you are downtown, you are either on campus or across the street. By the 1850s, half of the town’s residents were students at what would become Auburn University.
If you doubt that the town and the school are one, just ask at the corner drugstore.
One interesting one is Fort Collins Colorado. About 30 years ago it really felt like a college town, and was one. But over that time it has just started to feel less like a college town. The population has grown but not exploded. But somehow over that time the ‘feel’ has changed from college town to town that has a college.
Hmm I actually looked it up, and ft. Collins has grown much more than I was thinking. 43k in 1970, 65k in 1980 and probably 125k now, so that may be considered exploding.
Chapel Hill used to be a college town but now there are a lot of retired people there and also people who commute to jobs in RTP or Durham or Raleigh.
A lot of Duke professors live in Chapel Hill instead of Durham.
Baton Rouge’s city culture and feel is mostly influenced, not by the fact that it is the state capitol, but by LSU (and to a lesser extent, Southern University). The seasons are defined around college sports. The university is the one that attracts many of the main jobs, and in turn attracts other research facilities.
Without the university, Baton Rouge would be more like the manufacturing center it is… but the fact the university is there gives it a different feel.
College sports in the SEC (Southeastern conference) are a serious thing. You don’t see it in other geographical areas.
No. The rents are higher because the turnover rate is much higher, and young folks are more likely to cause damage, abandon their lease, or commit crimes (mostly underage drinking).
Another Canadian “college town” would probably be Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Permanent population: 3,700; Acadia University enrollment: 3,000. That said, I’ve never visited, so perhaps the town itself is not so college-oriented.
I also agree with the nomination of Kitchener-Waterloo as a college town. When I visited Kitchener-Waterloo a few years back, it reminded me a lot of the stereotypical American “college towns” I’ve visited: Ann Arbor, MI; Iowa City, IA; Urbana-Champaign, IL; and of course, my current home of Bloomington, IN.
I’ve found that rents tend to drop steeply as you move out of walking range of the school.
I was thinking about the Ann Arbor Ypsilanti split. Rents in the EMU area are considerably less than in downtown Ann Arbor, even though there is more crime and more reputation for student rowdiness in Ypsi. Ann Arbor has several extremely nice “grownup” expensive neighborhoods in walking distance to campus, and pricey downtown loft apartments. This is because Ann Arbor is where all the cool stuff is, and people want to live there.
Same situation in Charlottesville, VA. People love to soak up the atmosphere, grownup near campus housing is quite expensive and desireable.
Armidale, NSW seems to be Australia’s only example of a North Amercian-style college town. Given that the majority of Australians live in their state capitals it’s no surprise that that’s where most of their universities are located.
To fit the classic image, a college town must be small, and revolve completely around the college. Los Angeles, with particular reference to Westwood and South Central, is not a college town, and neither is New York City. But Champaign-Urbana, Chapel Hill, etc., are.
New Concord, Ohio. 2,600 residents, 1,700 of whom attend Muskingum U. (formerly College).
Can anyone find another case where the students are the majority?
Fort Collins feels more like “Boulder Light”, and in many ways it’s a good thing; e.g. it’s far more easygoing and less “hardcore” than that strange place 35 miles to the south. It might have been a classic “college town”, but now its vibe is defined by being a progressive community in general; cutting-edge urban planning, a very active downtown, outdoorsy Colorado culture, bicycle friendly, an ungodly number of brewpubs and microbreweries, brainy population, and the like. It’s a very vibrant city, but that vibrancy is now driven and flavored by more than just the presence of Colorado State University.
Which gets me thinking: I’ve been to some many towns or cities where, despite the presence of a good-sized or large college or university, at least in relation to the size of the town, there was very little or no college town “vibe” or “scene” compared to similarly sized communities with similarly sized colleges. A short list, which can probably be greatly expanded upon:
I moved to Chapel Hill from Chicago when I retired a few years ago, and in many ways it is still centered around UNC. One example which affects me is the public transit system; not only do most of the routes primarily serve the campus area, but the Saturday schedule is greatly reduced from the weekday schedule, and only two routes run on Sunday. Not only that, but the weekday routes run on a reduced schedule during the summer and UNC class breaks, with the evening routes being eliminated.
Salt Lake City (University of Utah)
SLC is part of much larger metropolitan center, but it identifies as a much smaller unit. There’s a mountain on the north end that seperates it from Bountiful and Layton, and the communities to the south are culturally very different.
Even within the small SLC community you don’t hear about U Utah much. If it weren’t for the football stadium on the main drag, I don’t think people would even know a University is there.
I think of Guelph, Ontario as being a college town too - the university is pretty central to the geography of the town, and kind of dominates it socially, too.
I grew up in a college town - Lennoxville, Québec (now merged into Sherbrooke, but will always be Lennoxville in my mind!). Population: approx 5500. Student population: about 2000 at Bishop’s University and 1200 at Champlain College (Cégep). If something happens in that town, it’s probably due to students! It is absolutely dead in the summer, but rocking from September to April!
This is all very interesting. In Ontario, I never went to Guelph, but I did go to Waterloo for a year and a half. I was on campus for first year (all first-year students had to live in residence on campus), and in second year we shared an apartment in “Cockroach Towers” (the apartment closest to campus–it was all students basically). I never got off campus much, bur I do remember that Waterloo University and WLU just down University Avenue weren’t near downtown Waterloo (such as it is) and were even further from downtown Kitchener. I never thought of the universities as dominating the town; the universities were their own communities on the north side of town. Maybe it’s changed now, with places like the Perimeter Institute, and the tech startups like RIM, and the new Waterloo School of Architecture in downtown Cambridge on the other side of Kitchener from the main campus.