Urban colleges with a well-defined campus?

Parents Forum
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<p>While there is a well defined main campus, there is also some “spillover” into the surrounding neighborhood, including the dorms and some museums.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.berkeley.edu/map/googlemap/”>Campus Map - University of California, Berkeley;

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<p>ucb, you could say the same thing about 90% of the campuses people have mentioned, going back to the very first posts in this thread.</p>

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<p>Many of the US News top 20 universities would more or less match:
Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, MIT, Penn, JHU, NU, Brown, WUSTL, Vanderbilt, Rice, Georgetown.</p>

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<p>BU certainly doesn’t belong on that list! Well defined campus was one of my younger son’s must-haves. He liked Vassar, Tufts, U of Chicago, American, Georgetown. </p>

<p>Schools that haven’t been mentioned:
Fordham
Caltech
Carnegie-Mellon (oops has been mentioned!)
WPI (Worcester is not much of a city either)
Clark (ditto)
How about the Claremont colleges? - their campuses blend in with each other, but they look very compact from Google maps.</p>

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<p>Nobody would consider Claremont a city. Downtown LA is an hour away.</p>

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<p>I’m not certain anyone cares much about access to downtown LA, though. LA is kind of sui generis in that regard.n It can take an hour to get there from UCLA sometimes. I know a set of sibs where one is at a Claremont college, and the other at USC, and they get together with one another way more than anyone expected.</p>

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<p>Northeastern. Great college with a beautiful campus right in the middle of Boston. </p>

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<p>University of San Diego, the campus is like a park.</p>

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<p>University of San Francisco</p>

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<p>Claremont is pretty quiet… the campus area is well defined, though.</p>

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<p>San Jose State University has a very well defined campus, with minimal spillover (one parking garage). Even the dorms are on the actual campus (southeast corner).
<a href=“Campus Map | Main Campus”>http://www.sjsu.edu/map/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Well it’s the “City of Claremont”, but I agree that at 35,000 it’s not very big! (I was not considering it a suburb of LA, BTW, I was under the impression that Claremont was bigger than that, but I’ve never been there.)</p>

<p>My younger son would have been fine with a small city when he was looking at colleges. What he didn’t want was colleges in the middle of the woods. Bard being the prime example of rural colleges he hated. George Washington and NYU were city colleges he also hated. But there was a pretty big Goldilocks zone of enough stuff off campus to feel like he wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, but also a campus defined enough that you didn’t see the city when you were in the central space.</p>

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<p>mathmom - I am guessing that’s what S would like. He loved Bucknell’s campus when we visited several years ago with D, but hated that it was in the middle of nowhere. Especially, now, being in boarding school in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, he definitely wants a college in a city!</p>

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<p>I figure that if non-university traffic can drive through campus, I would not really call it defined.
Defined campuses: Columbia, USC (but surrounding neighborhood not super great). UPenn (I heard, but haven’t been there). UCBerkeley, Santa Clara University. UCLA is fairly defined. </p>

<p>Claremont is in the suburbs, not a city; it’s got signs at all entrances which define the area, but non-university traffic goes thru it. Boston University does not have a defined campus. In my book, Yale is not a “defined” campus since traffic goes thru it. </p>

<p>To me, Columbia epitomizes the beautiful walled off campus in the midst of Manhattan.</p>

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<p>Claremont barely qualifies for suburb status, by SoCal standards. :)) </p>

<p>(It’s really a small town in which one can wear flip flops year 'round.)</p>

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<p>The map indicates that there is a lot of “spillover” into the surrounding neighborhoods:
<a href=“http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/”>http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>USC also seems to have some “spillover”:
<a href=“http://web-app.usc.edu/maps/map.pdf”>http://web-app.usc.edu/maps/map.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The other USC has plenty of “spillover”:
<a href=“Campus Map | University of South Carolina”>Campus Map | University of South Carolina;

<p>Pennsylvania also has considerable “spillover”:
<a href=“http://www.facilities.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/14BaseCampusMap.pdf”>http://www.facilities.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/14BaseCampusMap.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>SCU appears to have relatively little “spillover”:
<a href=“Phonebook - Santa Clara University”>Phonebook - Santa Clara University;

<p>UCLA’s “spillover” appears relatively limited, although there is a chunk of campus that is somewhat separate from most of the campus:
<a href=“http://www.ucla.edu/pdf/ucla-campus-map.pdf”>http://www.ucla.edu/pdf/ucla-campus-map.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Berkeley’s “spillover” is noted in a previous post.</p>

<p>San Jose State, as noted above, appears to still be the winner for most clearly defined urban campus with the least “spillover”.</p>

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<p>I’d say Univ of San Diego, in its totally insular (and beautiful) bubble, has the least spillover in a true big city. I went to Wisconsin and there’s a lot of spillover and Madison is not a real city imo, though I love it! Hard to call it urban. </p>

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<p>Are you interested in liberal arts colleges as well as universities? Macalaster has a nice campus in St Paul.</p>

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<p>There’s no such thing as a university of any size with no “spillover”. Even Stanford and Princeton have it, and those are about as defined as campuses get.</p>

<p>Lots of the urban universities have some core area that is walled off from the city (e.g., Yale’s Old Campus and Cross Campus, Harvard Yard and Radcliffe Quad), and other areas where, as YoHo YoHo puts it, traffic drives through. Penn and Chicago have gotten mentioned a lot here, and they are very much like that – a central core that is defined, but that comprises a relatively small portion of the total campus, and then lots of buildings that are effectively on big city streets (bigger, or at least carrying more traffic, at Penn than at Chicago).</p>

<p>The map may show that Columbia has spillover, but close attention should establish that most of that spillover has little or nothing to do with undergraduates. Columbia is a very walled-off, defined campus. So is Barnard, across the street (which, being Broadway, is a pretty big street). I think you could spend a lot of time as an undergraduate at Columbia and never mix with the general population, apart from crossing over to Barnard and back, or going down into the subway to go someplace else. Of course, why anyone would want to be so isolated escapes me, but Columbia was designed to encourage it.</p>

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<p>A freshman could probably manage to get around Harvard without setting foot on a Cambridge Street, but after that you’ll be walking through the town to get to your House. Each House is its own bubble with courtyards, so you still feel very much in a university once there. (The only reason you can avoid streets at Harvard as a freshman btw, is that they built an enormous pedestrian plaza over a portion of Mass Ave.)</p>