<p>SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (MarketWatch) -- When Dan Sharpe was looking at colleges during his senior year in high school, his search led him back to his home town near Columbus, Ohio.
Sharpe, who graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University a few years ago, also looked at East Coast schools but found their cost of living daunting. After two college internships, one of them in the Columbus area, he landed a job as a project manager with the non-profit Columbus Foundation after graduation.</p>
<p>Today, he lives in a spacious loft apartment in the city's fashionable Brewery District for under $600 a month. Staying in the area during and after college "allowed me to take advantage of lots of internship options and keep my living costs reasonable," he said.
Tuition, curriculum, and financial aid packages often top the list of considerations for high-school seniors anxiously awaiting college acceptances.
But as Sharpe's experience shows, location can have a huge impact on college living costs, internships, and post-graduation employment.
"I've talked to hundreds of seniors in college who have told me that they didn't realize how important college location was until they got to school. But it should be one of the top considerations for students and parents," said Todd Hoffman, a college researcher and consultant who quantifies the comparative merits of various college locations with his brainchild, the College Destinations Index.
Head of the class
Using 12 measures, the index, published by the American Institute for Economic Research, analyzes data from more than 290 cities and college towns to identify 75 of the best places in America to go to school. It includes financial considerations, such as cost of living, job opportunities, and earning potential, as well as other factors such as student diversity and the availability of cultural and leisure activities.
The top 75 locations range from college towns with less than 250,000 people to major cities with populations greater than 2.5 million.</p>
<p>San Francisco may be a great city to live in, but it’s rather sparse on colleges. SFSU (UCSF is grad only) is pretty much it. Cal and Stanford are nearby, but San Jose is counted separately.</p>
<p>This played a very significant role in my life as well. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and after I graduated I realized there was no realistic way to pursue my plans and live in Madison at the same time. The job market was saturated with new graduates, driving down salaries and making me easily replaceable at my first job out of college. Furthermore, and I realize this is only relevant to the biomedical sciences, but since there was only one major research university in the city, I had to relocate for graduate school (many schools won’t accept their own undergrads for Phd, they call it academic inbreeding).</p>
<p>Raleigh/Durham is the designation of the MSA that includes Chapel Hill (or at least this used to be the case, until recently when for some crazy reason it was split into two MSAs). In any event, the folks that live around here tend to think of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Cary (which is bigger than Chapel Hill) as one big city that we refer to as the Research Triangle.</p>
<p>Thanks for the laughs! I hadn’t realized the mis-spelling was in the article - didn’t read it til I saw the replies. Yes, it is cringe-worthy! I thought IBClass06 was cringing at the city, not the spelling. Thanks!</p>
<p>Why include Pittsburgh?
There are tons of colleges down town and the city is extremely livable. I have friends sharing a three bed room HUGE house that rents for under 800 dollars/month… There’s a good amount of clubs and events and is a good climate(never super hot or cold)</p>
<p>Any listing of college towns that includes Lexington, KY, and Fayetteville, AK, but omits Athens, GA, and Gainesville, FL, is automatically suspect. Ann Arbor, with or without the extra e, pish-posh. It’s in Michigan for goodness sake!</p>