Looking at colleges with an eye on the weather? Find out where the coldest campuses in the US are. https://www.collegeconfidential.com/articles/frozen-campuses/
Average January Low (F)
Carleton: 6°
Dartmouth: 7°
Colby: 7°
St. Lawrence: 7°
Macalester: 8°
Bates: 9°
Middlebury: 10°
Bowdoin: 11°
Grinnell: 11°
(Data source: Sperling’s.)
If Carleton is going to be on the list you’ve gotta add St. Olaf in the same town ;-).
One of my friends is a professor at Minnesota St. -Moorhead. He said it was going to be -35F this morning.
Good point! My primary intent, however, was simply to add some data to the “student reviews of weather” that partially informs the underlying source in the orginal post.
Isn’t Carleton off for most of January? Kinda scary that my kid’s college is on that list! And they go back early in Japan, too. Brrrr.
^^^Good point. Bowdoin is off much of January too.
Actually Carleton runs trimesters. Their winter term began on January 7 this year.
Heartbreaking: “University of Iowa Student Is Among More Than 20 Dead in Midwestern Deep Freeze”
University of North Dakota has to be right up there. Grand Forks is far colder than the Twin cities, and slightly colder than Fargo.
Most colleges have Fall and Spring semesters. McGill (#4 most frozen) has Fall and Winter semesters. There was a proposal to rename the Winter semester as Spring semester. It did get approval. 
Yeah, this is a garbage list. You have to think it should just be a weather map overlayed with college addresses, but somehow there’s a need to spread things out and be inclusive. Hot take: no school in Iowa is colder than the schools in MN or ND. How about the MN schools all coming from the southern half of the state (including one from within the heat island.) I think we’re looking at two things: a list put together by non-STEM students, and a list of CC-acceptable schools instead of actual schools.
It’s a list put together by College Prowler, based on “student reviews of weather, average high and low temperatures during summer and winter, and average summer and winter precipitation amounts,” lifted in its entirety by The Weather Channel, then pared down by CC. So yeah, garbage list.
@StPaulDad: I’ve lived on the upper plains (North Dakota). I know what winters are like there, and recognize that all schools in that region would be colder than all others. My list simply sampled selective colleges with substantial out-of-state enrollments (and therefore was not numbered). I’d thought the data associated with these schools might be interesting to some.
That said, I removed rounding and corrected Colby:
Average January Low (F)
Carleton / St. Olaf: 5.5°
Colby: 6.3°
St. Lawrence: 6.7°
Dartmouth: 7.3°
Macalester: 7.5°
Bates: 9.3°
Middlebury: 9.8°
Bowdoin: 11.0°
Grinnell: 11.1°
@Lindagaf: Bates, in staying open for most of January, seems to offer a nice opportunity for its students to experience the full range of seasons in the upper Northeast, IMO.
@57special: Grand Forks registers an average January low of -1.8 (F) degrees.
Oh yes, she says they all just hurry between classes and the campus is small. Meant to say January, notJapan!
Dave Berry needs to brush up on his geography.
University of Alaska Fairbanks. Average January low is -17 F.
https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/fairbanks/alaska/united-states/usak0083
Wyoming is pretty cold because it is windy and at a high altitude. However, the students don’t think weather is an issue and wouldn’t report it on a survey as such. I’ve been there when it is 10 degrees and students are walking back from the gym in shorts and hoodies, and students ride bikes year round.
Another student dies in bitter cold, in Vermont.
I’m starting to think we parents have failed to teach our children how to dress for extreme weather. Their familiarity with central heating, heated automobiles, etc., leads to a false sense of what the human body can withstand. I’ve seen it in my own kids, even though I was forever lecturing them on how to dress for the weather.
@LucieTheLakie While not mentioned as a contributing cause in the article alcohol can lead to many bad decisions.
I wondered about that in both cases, @TomSrOfBoston. All the more reason to remind our kids to dress appropriately for the weather and that alcohol is not a substitute for a warm coat (it actually lowers core body temperature) while impairing judgment.
While on our cruise the past week, we talked to many people from Florida who just will not believe that anyone happily lives in Maine, ha. I told them, good, tell everyone how horrible it is so more people don’t move here.