<p>...situated in small college towns while Canadian, and Eurasian ones occur more in urbanized areas?</p>
<p>I am looking at large public institutions to appt for and do not want to live in a small city. Only choices I got are ASU, UCLA, and WSU. If I go to Canada I can goto York, uoft, ubc, McGill, and the country is 1/10th the size.</p>
<p>Well Canada only has 63 universities, the US has thousands so even with a population 1/10th the size the average University size will be larger. They are also all public universities in Canada so they tend to be bigger than the US privates.</p>
<p>The big Canadian universities have an emphasis on research so they are often located in the middle of downtown cities where all the private and public research institutes are, hence they are the hub of large research networks for their cities.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry to much about going to a school that is 40 000 people or 20 000 people, at that size, it doesn’t really make a difference in terms of atmosphere. What really makes a difference is how integrated the university is with the city. For example UBC is huge but completely self contained and on the outskirts of Vancouver whereas UofT is completely integrated in Toronto- you have many areas where university buildings are beside public buildings and private business. </p>
<p>Also for big US schools in cities, what about University of Texas at Austin? it has more than 50 000 students. You also have New York University also with over 50 000 students in the heart of New York.</p>
<p>Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head, I am sure you could find more pretty easily.</p>
<p>Public universities in urban areas:</p>
<p>Arizona State University
California State University: Dominguez Hills, East Bay, Fullerton, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Northridge, Pomona, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, San Marcos
Chicago State University
City University of New York, various campuses
Florida International University
Georgia Institute of Technology
North Carolina State University
Northeast Illinois University
Portland State University
Temple University
The Ohio State University
University of Arizona
University of California: Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego
University of Colorado, Denver
University of Houston
University of Illinois, Chicago
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
University of Massachusetts, Boston
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
University of Pittsburgh
University of South Florida
University of Texas: Austin, Dallas, El Paso, San Antonio
University of Washington, Seattle
Wayne State University</p>
<p>However, not all of them are over 40,000 students; that criterion may be what is limiting your search. “Large” universities in the 20,000 to 39,999 student range may be more common in the US.</p>
<p>I don’t care to spend a lot of time researching my answer, but I’d hypothesize that a lot of those large public universities are, or at least began as, land-grant colleges.</p>