True College Towns

When you think about a college town, you might think about a town where people put out a lot of college memorabilia in their yard or even how many bars are in a one mile ring around campus. For our purposes, we looked at true college towns with two demographic components: total university enrollment as a percentage of the total population, and total business employment at a university.

First, to look at these demographics and statistics, we need to define the area that we looked at. For our purposes, a place level of geography would not work because many universities are not in incorporated places – examples – Rochester Institute of Technology (3663014), Villanova PA (4280248), Stony Brook University (3671620), or University of Virginia (5180165). Zip codes don’t work either, because many universities have their own Zip codes, like Texas Christian University (76129). Instead, we used urbanized areas. There are about 2,600 nationwide, with population sizes ranging from New York (19.06 million) to Munds Park AZ (662 people). According to the Census Bureau, urbanized areas are defined as an area that “comprises one or more places—central place(s)—and the adjacent densely settled surrounding area—urban fringe—consisting of other places and nonplace territory.”

College towns could very well be defined as areas with a high percentage of residents seeking a university degree. For this ranking, we looked only at the population seeking a bachelor’s degree or a graduate degree at both private and public universities. No community college enrollment was used. When you look at the total percentage enrolled as a percentage of the total area population, the top 10 on the list are likely not what you thought would be on the list. The chart below shows these places and the universities that call these places home. Unsurprisingly, all are public universities.

We also thought it was important to look at the percentage of the people who are employed at a university in these urbanized areas. It is important to note that these people work in the area, but may not live there. The top of this list is very similar to the first list, with Cullowhee, North Carolina topping the list as Western Carolina University dominates the town. For most of this list, the local university is the main employer in the area.

So, what makes a true college town? While this list certainly doesn’t include some of the names that we initially thought of, college towns should probably be thought of more as an area that shuts down when the students go home for breaks. Areas like Cullowhee and Storrs certainly fit this definition.