USA Today has reported on a survey of college towns conducted by a private company called Collegia. Taking a look at their published results, I have to question their information.
As an example, they list San Diego, California as the city with the highest concentration of college students. I immediately thought that figure must be wrong. San Diego is a major city with a population of 1,223,400 (2000 census). How could it have a student population comparable to any of the small cities which are essentially built around a college? As an example, I found that Ithaca, NY has a population of 29,287. Cornell University and Ithaca College have a combined 2002 enrollment of 26,427. San Diego would have to have a million college students to achieve the same concentration.
Other ratings were equally suspicious, but less subject to objective review. The survey listed Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as the college town with the best nightlife and restaurants. I’m sure Pittsburgh has many excellent examples of both but does it really beat New Orleans, San Francisco, Miami, or New York? Syracuse, New York is listed as the best city for spectator sports, despite having no professional major league franchises. Nashville, Tennessee is listed as having the best performing arts. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I have to feel other cities might offer a wider variety.
I dodn’t have a point I guess. It was just an example of a news article that didn’t sound true to me.
I’ve been told that UT Austin, with ~50,000 students, is one of the largest universities in the country. And Austin’s metro population is ~1.1 million.
Is Atlanta on that list? I think we have eight billion universities here. Well, maybe that’s a little high, but between Tech and State and Emory, we should be right up there.
When I think of a college town, I think of a town whose history is tied up with the college. A town whose population is dominated by students of a particular town.
I went to Northwestern. I loved and love Evanston. Perfect example.
I’m a student at NU now. According to the 2000 census, there were 74,239 people in Evanston at the time. Northwestern’s student body, grad students inclusive, should be about 10,000. One student for every 7.4 residents is probably a pretty high concentration.
I’m assuming that the students weren’t counted as part of the Evanston population in the census. If they were, then the ratio would be more like 6.4 residents to each student.
The only thing I can think of is that Collegia arbitrarily set a lower limit on cities at a population of 1,000,000 or something like that. But in other categories they included smaller cities like College Station, Texas.