CityNerd is a YouTube channel talking about new urbanism — how architecture, public policy, transportation, infrastructure, and culture combine to create enjoyable, livable cities. In a recent video, he goes over his top ten college towns, including a few that come up on CC pretty regularly.
We all have our heuristics for evaluating college towns; I thought it was neat to see a list that doesn’t actually have anything to do with the universities themselves, moreso the context the universities are in.
Yeah, Bloomington is great, but this list used a very formulaic approach, so there must have been some part of the formula which excluded it. Same deal with Madison, and another of other popular college towns.
Edit: By the way, the theme was not so much greats towns in which to go to college, but great college towns you might want to consider living in outside of college. That helps explain the emphasis on, say, intercity transportation links (preferably rail).
Starts off with that overhead view of Chapel Hill, but no mention of it.
10-San Luis Obispo, CA
9-Corvallis, OR
8-Charlottesville, VA
7-Ann Arbor, MI
6-Boulder, CO
5-Amherst, MA
4-Davis CA
3-Burlington VT
2-Ithaca NY
1-State College PA
honorable mention
Oxford, UK
dishonorable mention
Oxford MS
Also likes (too attached to bigger cities for his “college town” definition)
New Brunswick, NJ
East Lansing, MI
Berkeley, CA
Cambridge, MA
I wonder if the dishonorable mention of Oxford, MS wasn’t more about the guy’s personal feelings, Oxford is a lovely town. He trashes its walking score which I found surprising, so I checked Oxford MS - Walk Score.
Edited to add, it looks like which zip code you enter. Downtown Oxford is adorable and very walkable.
Edit: It is the Walk Score you get when you just put in the whole city.
I think this gets back to it being more of a city-to-live-in rating than city-to-go-to-college in rating. If you are going to Ole Miss and living on or near campus, you might have little reason to care about most of Oxford’s Walk Score.
I also note that Oxford is in fact quite the walkable college town. Also a plausible place to live in the sense it is a decent-sized town, quite a bit larger than Cambridge. Although I gather Cambridge is growing rapidly, including due to local tech employers and such. But Cambridge and Cambridge, as you imply, would not have set up the joke.
I think as a general rule, most European university towns are going to crush most US college towns by this person’s metrics. They are mostly going to be denser, more walkable, higher bike scores, lots more train service . . . .
On a purely personal note, among European university towns I have seen, as noted in another post I have to agree Oxford (England) is a classic. Another I really liked is Uppsala (Sweden). I’m not sure Seville counts, but it is very nice.
I’ve never been to Heidelberg (it was planned then cancelled and we never replanned), but I hear it is great. Same with your nominee, Tubingen, and Freiburg.
I also feel like half the towns in the Netherlands are university towns.
Yes to Heidelberg - its university being almost another century older.
But (in European scale), some might view Heidelberg with its trams more as a “city”, which is why I picked Tübingen, which has under 100,000 residents and still more of a “town” feel.
(Spent a lot of time visiting various big “Kombinats” in the back country of then-still GDR, after the borders had just opened - and before that for other reasons, while the iron curtain was still firmly in place. And infrastructure was … “challenging”.)
