<p>Oberlin did NOT make the Top 25 List of service oriented or "Do-Gooder" schools. So much for that image. Maybe today's Obies are aiming for Wall Street instead. :)</p>
<p>It's funny how Oberlin is considered "suburban" instead of rural because Cleveland is 35 miles away. How far away from a large city do you have to be to no longer be considered suburban? Most New Yorkers would consider Oberlin, Ohio extremely rural. LOL</p>
<p>Well, the area a few miles out of town is certainly rural, but I think there is enough there between the college and Downtown Oberlin that you can’t rightly call the town itself rural. How many rural areas have a dozen restaurants, a movie theater, a post office, a hardware store, several churches and a AAA office all within walking distance of one another, not to mention four or five hundred concerts per year? It sure as heck isn’t urban, so suburban was the only category left to put it in.</p>
<p>But if you subtract Oberlin College, most of those businesses go away, along with the concerts. Then what have you got? I don’t think it’s a suburb. :)</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m just having fun with this. I’m not trying to start an argument or anything. It seems to me Oberlin is a town, just like Elyria. Can you be a town and a suburb too? I wonder if there is a universally understood definition of suburb. Oberlin does not feel like a suburb of Cleveland. If that’s the case, then Newark, New Jersey is a suburb of NYC, and I don’t think anyone would agree with that. Again, it makes me wonder what constitutes a suburb.</p>
<p>I think that a fair number of people actually do live in Oberlin and commute to Cleveland–very different from 30 years ago. That’s what I think of when i think of a suburb.</p>
<p>Well, if the college were not there the area would almost certainly be rural, but the point would also be moot. The college is there and it has accumulated enough other stuff around it over the years to change the character of the place. I think it got thrown in the suburban bin by default because it is a less bad fit there than in the rural bin, and it sure is not urban.</p>
<p>Given the three categories that US News provides, Newark would be an urban environment, not suburban because it happens to be within commuting distance of a larger city.</p>
<p>I think the definition of suburban has less to do with commuting these days, given the movement of large businesses out of cities over the past several decades and the rise of telecommuting.</p>