What is a college town exactly?
To answer that question,
let's start in Ames, Iowa.
Home to Iowa State University.
Go Cyclones.
The city has a population of 66,000 people,
which includes 27,000 students.
Students are almost exactly 40% of the population.
Here's a list of the top five employers in Ames
and you can see that Iowa State employs 10 times the number
of people as the second largest employer in town,
and you can ask anyone with a degree from Iowa State.
Ames is absolutely a college town.
Let me put forth a definition
that will certainly ring true to Cyclones
and other college town residents,
past and present.
These are towns or cities whose community character
is largely dominated
by their college student population.
In these cities, the high number of college students,
at least 20% of the population,
tends to skew the economic
and social trends of the area toward the needs of students.
The university is typically the largest employer as well,
exerting even more economic impact on the town itself.
Cities like Madison, Wisconsin occupy a gray area.
Madison's larger than Ames with a population
of over 250,000
and over 600,000 in the metro area,
but it's still home to a major university.
In this case, the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and its 50,000 students.
That's only 18% of the city's total population.
The university is the largest employer,
but it's also home to many people who work
for the state government
as it's the state capital.
I'd still call it a college town,
but I could see how someone might not.
Even more difficult to classify is Boston, Massachusetts.
The area is home to over 50 universities
including MIT, Harvard, Tufts,
Northeastern, Boston University, and Boston College.
There are over 350,000 college students
in a region of nearly five million.
The exact ratio of students
in total population is 7.32%,
which makes it the second highest ratio
of students for regions over one million people.
Can you guess the region with the highest ratio?
Believe it or not,
Los Angeles squeaks by Boston with 7.34%.
LA is massive for the region is home to three
University of California schools,
nine Cal State Schools,
USC, Caltech, and more.
But for the purposes of this video
we're gonna focus on regions
with less than a million people
as that's where you get your classic college town.
Otherwise, they're just big cities
with lots of universities.
Here's a list of the top 10 regions and metros
between 100,000 and a million people
ordered based on the percentage of students.
All of these are shoo-ins for College Towns,
populations of a couple hundred thousand
in the region,
and home to one or two major universities.
They're college town.
Now, people who attended universities
and College Towns generally have fond memories of them.
These towns have a nice mixture
of cultural amenities, restaurants
and above average public transit,
but in a smaller town.
I did a little Twitter poll and found that a strong majority
of respondents would even wanna live in one post-graduation.
What makes College Towns so appealing
and what makes them different from regular small towns?
Let's go back to college and find out after the bike bell.
[Bike bell Ringing]
Okay, I think we covered what a college town is,
but let's take a second
and talk about what makes them so special, so different.
I think the basic, most obvious answer here
is that there's a college campus located within them.
They're considered anchor institutions
because they're large,
long lasting and major employers.
Hospitals also fit the bill
and are sometimes collectively called eds and meds
in the planning world.
College campuses are often cities within cities
consisting of student housing,
offices, classrooms, dining, shopping
and even power plants.
They can also have their own police departments.
Many college campuses have their own campus master plans
that essentially govern land use
and development within their boundaries.
These plans are done
in cooperation with a local city government.
While college campuses can feel
like entirely separate cities,
they obviously have a major impact
on the surrounding college town as well
and can even spawn separate districts related
to that college campus.
Let's take the top example off that list from before.
Ithaca, New York
home to Cornell University.
I have some personal experience here
as that's where I went and got my undergraduate degree,
and I think it makes a great example.
Ithaca is located here in the middle
of nowhere in upstate New York
at the southern end of Cayuga Lake,
One of the Finger Lakes.
Here's downtown Ithaca
with its famous Ithaca Commons Pedestrian Mall.
The city is home to Ithaca College located here
and Cornell University,
go Big Red, located up here on a hill.
I'm gonna be focusing on Cornell here
because it's older and larger,
and had more of a time to make an impact on Ithaca.
No offense to my IC friends out there.
Cornell's campus is a massive 930 hectares,
but central campus where all the classes are is here.
The university has additional districts
that form a symbiotic relationship with the campus.
The first is aptly name for this video, College Town.
It's home to thousands of students who live
off campus as well as many student serving businesses
including restaurants, bars, and convenience stores.
It's like an entirely separate downtown district,
but just for students.
And indeed, it feels more like a big city
in College Town than it does in downtown Ithaca.
The informal name for this type
of district is student ghetto
because traditionally they consisted
of students renting dilapidated houses
and cramming in as many people
as they could fit to keep rents low.
You'll know you're in a student ghetto
when you see a couch on a front porch
or a beer pong table in the front lawn.
These districts grew right
after World War II as GIs returning
from the war went back to college,
overwhelming on campus housing.
Nearby landlords took advantage of the influx,
and pretty soon old neighborhoods
around campus became the student ghetto.
College Town and Ithaca used to look more like that.
But as tastes changed and incomes arose,
there began to be a market for less squalid lodgings.
Today, College Town and student ghettos
across the US are beginning to look less dodgy
and overall nicer if not straight up luxurious.
Of course, not all off-campus housing is found
in the student ghetto.
For many, university is an opportunity
to join a fraternity or sorority,
and most universities have a place where they're clustered.
These districts may have different names
but Frat Row is a common one.
Cornell's Greek district is located near West Campus
and has 25 fraternities and one sorority.
Frats gathered at this location
over 100 years ago for a few main reasons.
First, it was close to campus,
making it convenient for members to walk to class.
Second, they wanted to be away
from College Town and its lower class vibe.
Third, they wanted to be
near the dorms on West Campus to attract future pledges.
And finally, they all wanted to cluster together
because no frat wanted to be viewed as too far away.
Clustering ensures that there will always
be neighbors to go to your parties.
Our final district is not for students,
but instead for faculty.
Nearly every university has a district nearby
where many professors live and have lived for decades.
Ithaca has a couple of these.
One is the affluent suburb of Cayuga Heights.
Nearly two thirds
of Cayuga Heights residents hold graduate degrees,
which underscores the density of professors.
The second is Bryant Park near College Town.
Both districts were built by the same real estate developer
at the turn of the last century,
but Cayuga Heights' lots were more expensive
with views of the lake.
Wealthier faculty moved there
and poorer ones moved to Bryant Park.
That's still roughly the same division today.
These districts have saved off incursions
of student populations by being savvy politically.
Cayuga Heights has had a professor
as mayor for nearly its entire history
and enacts policies to limit student housing.
Bryant Park residents have been vigilant
about getting real estate agents to sell
to families instead of students.
Why do professors wanna live so close to campus?
It seems that as a group,
they value being
within walking and cycling distance to work,
and are several times more likely to do so
than the general public.
Professors are more likely to have odd teaching hours
and need to get to their offices
in evenings and weekends,
and they like to be near libraries,
cultural institutions and the park-like settings of quads.
So a college town will have a campus, student ghetto,
frat row, and faculty enclaves.
If you add all those up,
that's a significant impact on local land use.
And it's the reason why universities have
an outside influence on local planning issues.
That's not something all residents appreciate,
particularly if they don't have any sort
of relationship with the local university.
One common complaint is that as university enrollments grow,
more students move to town
and push out local renters
and raise rents overall.
Universities have responded to this complaint
by building more on-campus student housing,
but students often find that on-campus options
are more expensive than off-campus housing.
According to the research,
the studentification
of neighborhoods near a university
result in actually overall lower rents,
but may still result
in more scarcity citywide,
particularly for units
for sale as housing is converted to student rentals.
Another challenge facing town-gown relationships
as they're known is that students like to party.
Most of the time,
these parties cause only minor nuisance issues,
but occasionally they get out of hand
and increase stress between
the university community and local residents.
One example from 2021 is a party turned riot
in Boulder, Colorado
home to the University of Colorado.
Police were called to a loud party at 5:00 p.m.
Who were pelted with rocks and bottles.
By 9:00 p.m.
hundreds of students flooded the streets,
overwhelming the police
and caused significant property damage.
Events like these make local residents resentful
of students and the universities they attend.
But I think most of it agree that the presence
of a university in a city is generally a good thing.
And like I said at the beginning of the video,
lots of people would like to live
in a College Town even if they weren't students.
And if I could get personal for a second
I'd have to agree.
I'm super overeducated,
so I've lived in four different College Towns
and I have to say that they're pretty great.
I live in one right now,
San Luis Obispo,
home to Cal Poly, where I teach.
And you know, college towns aren't for everyone.
But for a lot of people,
they're gonna like the mix of amenities and size.
My own theory is that they combine some of the benefits
of large cities with the charm of smaller towns.
They're actually sort of what the suburbs should have been.
Here's an example.
Here at Cal Poly, parking spaces are limited
and freshmen are not allowed to bring their own cars.
This is a pretty common policy
in space constrained campuses.
This means students need to either walk, bike
or take a bus to get around town.
The result is
that San Luis Obispo has a bus system that's better
than what you'd expect from a similar sized city
without a university,
and it also increases the need
for a great pedestrian and bicycle network.
And while San Luis Obispo has a student ghetto
with apartments and restaurants catering to students,
students are also part
of the reason why downtown San Luis Obispo is so great.
Students shop here,
go to bars here, hang out here.
And that's generally a good thing.
A college town and its university may not have
an absolutely perfect relationship all the time,
but it's clearly a symbiotic one
and one that results in some pretty great places.
College towns aren't the only place to go
to learn something new.
We have this fancy new technology called the internet,
which means you can learn from anywhere,
and it can even be hands-on and interactive.
So if you're thinking about going back to university,
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Thank you.