Flagship state university towns

[Docere]

Let's hear about them.

A report on the growth of Madison, arguably the best of the "type."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbqiL3AMy-A

Champaign-Urbana IL (via Steely Dan).

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.1103252,...xu8nt19zjdbEH2QPU_FEg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

[Steely Dan]

Madison is now almost getting too big to really best exemplify the textbook university town.

Ann Arbor is probably the best of the lot in the big 10, though Iowa City and Bloomington, IN are pretty nice too.

Champaign is pretty good too, and getting better.

West Lafayette didn't impress me a ton, probably the most lackluster of the big 20 college towns I've been to

Minneapolis and Columbus are great cities, but they're too big, and Evanston is great too, but again as a suburb of a GIANT city, it's not quite the same thing either.

Never been to East Lansing nor any of the newer big 10 towns east of Ohio.

[The North One]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Madison is now almost getting too big to really best exemplify the textbook university town.

Madison is also a state capital so IDK if we could ever say it was a textbook college town.

Evanston is great too, but again as a suburb of a GIANT city, it's not quite the same thing either.

Well so is Ann Arbor. Although I guess not to the same extent Evanston is.

[202_Cyclist]

Davis and San Luis Obispo are also nice towns.

[TWAK]

Originally Posted by 202_Cyclist

Davis and San Luis Obispo are also nice towns.

Davis and SLO are both pretty cool, although Davis is reallllly NIMBY. Berkeley isn't too bad, but that could really upset some folks .
CA's flagship school would be Cal (maybe?), but I'm not sure who the "state" would be. I'll pick CSUS because that's where I went and it's the capital city.

[iheartthed]

I think I've only been to four flagship college towns that aren't a major or large city:

Ann Arbor
Berkeley
College Park
New Brunswick

I was drunk most of the time that I was in College Park, so I don't really remember a lot of the details. Ann Arbor and Berkeley are fairly evenly matched. Ann Arbor might have a slight edge on having a more iconic campus, while Berkeley has the better location (much more scenic and easier to commute into the city from there).

New Brunswick is okay, but definitely not as pretty as Ann Arbor or Berkeley. The biggest plus is having a train station right on the Northeast Corridor line, which means direct commuter rail access to NYC and Philadelphia, and also easy Amtrak access to Boston, Baltimore and D.C.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by The North One

Madison is also a state capital so IDK if we could ever say it was a textbook college town.

that's a fair point. even if wisconsin had stuck its flagship university elsewhere in the state, madison would still be a thing because it was chosen as the location of the state capital first. the university was founded there about a decade later.

Originally Posted by The North One

Well so is Ann Arbor. Although I guess not to the same extent Evanston is.

it might be because i'm a billion times more familiar with evanston than i am with ann arbor (i worked in evanston for 2 decades, i've only been to ann arbor a few times), but to me ann arbor feels WAY more like its own independent college town deal than evanston.

some reasons:



1. distance

downtown evanston to downtown chicago: 12 miles

downtown ann arbor to downtown detroit: 36 miles

evanston's and chicago's municipal limits physically touch, sharing a fully developed border with each other for nearly 2.5 miles along howard street.

ann arbor's and detroit's municpal limits are 22 miles apart at their closest and the inbetween space is 100% textbook exurban sprawlsville, not contiguous urban development.




2. connection

evanston is connected to its parent city by both a CTA L line, a Metra commuter rail line, and multiple CTA bus routes, and these infrastructure connections have been in place for well over a century now.

detroit has talked about starting up a commuter rail line to connect with ann arbor for a while, but as of today, the only transit connection between the two is a 1 hour bus ride.



3. size

compared to its giant public state flagship brothers in the big 10, northwestern is a relatively small university, and it's much more heavily oriented to post-grads

Northwestern - 8,327 undergrad / 13,619 post-grad

Michigan - 31,329 undergrad / 16,578 post-grad

additionally, NU has a substantial secondary campus in downtown chicago that's been there for nearly a century now. it's home to the university's hospital, the medical school, the law school, the school of professional studies, and some of the MBA program, so a lot of those NU post-grads listed above don't spend a great deal of time up on the evanston campus.

all of this means that evanston just isn't dominated by students to the same extent that ann arbor is. yes, NU students certainly have a very significant presence in and around downtown evanston, but its not like the 30K+ undergrads crawling all over AA, IMO.





bottom line: ann arbor feels way more like a traditional university town to me than evanston does. in fact, back the early 20th century, evanston held a referendum about being annexed into the city of chicago. the measure failed by just 7 votes.

if those 7 votes had gone the other way, today we'd be talking about evanston as merely another neighborhood of chicago instead of evanston "the suburb".

is rogers park a "college town" because of the presence of loyola university? no, it's just a neighborhood of chicago. that very well could've been evanston too.

[iheartthed]

Ann Arbor is not a suburb of Detroit, but is definitely a satellite of it. Ann Arbor's relationship to Detroit is more like New Brunswick's to New York or Philadelphia. Both college towns obviously benefit from the infrastructure of a major metro area, but neither were created by population spillover from their major cities.

[Docere]

Flagship universities in the United States (Wikipedia):

University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa)
University of Alaska Fairbanks
University of Arizona (Tempe)
University of Arkansas (Fayetteville)
State University of New York at Buffalo
University of California, Berkeley
University of Colorado, Boulder
University of Connecticut (Storrs)
University of Delaware (Newark)
University of Florida (Gainesville)
University of Georgia (Athens)
University of Hawaii Manoa (Honolulu)
University of Houston
University of Idaho (Moscow)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Indiana University Bloomington
University of Iowa (Iowa City)
University of Kansas (Lawrence)
University of Kentucky (Fayetteville)
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge)
University of Maine (Orono)
University of Maryland, College Park
University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
University of Minnesota (Twin Cities)
Mississippi State University (Starkville)
University of Mississippi (Oxford)
University of Missouri (Columbia)
University of Montana (Missoula)
University of Nebraska Lincoln
University of Nevada, Reno
University of New Hampshire (Durham)
University of New Mexico (Albuquerque)
New Mexico Stata University (Las Cruces)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
North Dakota State University (Fargo)
University of North Dakota (Grand Forks)
University of North Texas (Denton)
Ohio State University (Columbus)
University of Oklahoma (Norman)
University of Oregon (Eugene)
Pennsylvania State University (University Park)
University of Pittsburgh
Purdue University (West Lafayette IN)
University of Rhode Island (Kingston)
Rutgers University (New Brunswick NJ)
University of South Carolina (Columbia)
University of South Dakota (Vermillion)
Southern Illinois University (Carbondale)
State University of New York at Stony Brook
University of Tennessee (Knoxville)
Texas A&M University (College Station)
University of Texas at Austin
Texas Tech University (Lubbock)
University of Utah (Salt Lake City)
University of Vermont (Burlington)
University of Virginia (Charlottesville)
University of Washington (Seattle)
West Virginia University (Morgantown)
University of Wisconsin - Madison
University of Wyoming (Laramie)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Flagship_universities_in_the_United_States

[bnk]

Originally Posted by The North One

Madison is also a state capital so IDK if we could ever say it was a textbook college town.



Well so is Ann Arbor. Although I guess not to the same extent Evanston is.

I was going to mention the fact that they are state capitals.

If University of Illinois was founded in 1867 in Springfield which was the Capital of the state by than, instead at Urbana-Champaign I would figure Springfield would be a much larger and nicer town. Not Madison, Topography is different but I'm sure it would have been nice Capital/collage city.

Iowa City is a pretty good collage town and used to be the capital of Iowa before they moved it to Des Moines.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by bnk

I was going to mention the fact that they are state capitals.

If University of Illinois was founded in 1867 in Springfield which was the Capital of the state by than, instead at Urbana-Champaign I would figure Springfield would be a much larger and nicer town. Not Madison, Topography is different but I'm sure it would have been nice Capital/collage city.

in some ways, it's kind of a shame for downstate IL that a significant secondary urban center didn't form in the middle of the state to have at least a modest amount of gravity to counterbalance chicago to a small degree.

instead, central IL ended up with that triangular cluster of 5 small cities defined by springfield, champaign, and peoria, with bloomington and decatur in between. they're all pretty small potatoes on their own, but if the bulk of their total population had coalesced around one place, instead of being dispersed among the 5 small cities, it might have actually amounted to something much more significant than the sum of their parts.

MSA populations (2020):

peoria: 402K
champaign: 222K
springfield: 202K
bloomington: 171K
decatur: 103K


that's 1.1M people. it's no chicago, but it might've been big enough to warrant a real airport, and with a real airport, perhaps companies like ADM and Caterpillar don't move their HQ's to chicago, and maybe with major corporate presence anchors like those two giants, others could be grown/attracted, along with all the other tangential benefits that come from being a state capital and home to the state flagship university.


it's interesting to think about anyway, but water under the bridge now.

[bnk]

Originally Posted by bnk

I was going to mention the fact that they are state capitals.

If University of Illinois was founded in 1867 in Springfield which was the Capital of the state by than, instead at Urbana-Champaign I would figure Springfield would be a much larger and nicer town. Not Madison, Topography is different but I'm sure it would have been nice Capital/collage city.

Iowa City is a pretty good collage town and used to be the capital of Iowa before they moved it to Des Moines.

I also mentioned Iowa City.

[pdxtex]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Madison is now almost getting too big to really best exemplify the textbook university town.

Ann Arbor is probably the best of the lot in the big 10, though Iowa City and Bloomington, IN are pretty nice too.

Champaign is pretty good too, and getting better.

West Lafayette didn't impress me a ton, probably the most lackluster of the big 20 college towns I've been to

Minneapolis and Columbus are great cities, but they're too big, and Evanston is great too, but again as a suburb of a GIANT city, it's not quite the same thing either.

Never been to East Lansing nor any of the newer big 10 towns east of Ohio.

I went to MSU. East Lansing is nice but its more of a strip than a grid if that makes any sense. Ann Arbor is way more of a city, city. I like the general area tho. Lansing is gritty but creative, and growing. MSU is the Arizona State for Chicago kids.

[pj3000]

If you're looking for big state school collegiate Shangri-La, I think State College, Pennsylvania (aka Happy Valley) would have to be high on your list.

It's own little world in the middle of the lush ridges and valleys of central PA.

[202_Cyclist]

It is a smaller town but Burlington, VT, is very nice and walkable.


Image courtesy of Onasill ~ Bill - Be Safe & Happy --Flickr.

[Crawford]

Speaking only about the campus & town, no commentary on academics. And excluding major urban centers and university towns enveloped by major metros. So no Ohio State or UCLA or Texas.

IMO, Madison is about as good as it gets.

AA is good, but somewhat overhyped. Town is great, campus is meh. East Lansing is pretty blah. Campus mostly feels like a big suburb. Bloomington is very charming. West Lafayette sucks. Charlottesville is very nice. Burlington is even better.

[pj3000]

I would also say Charlottesville, Burlington, Chapel Hill, Athens, ...

I liked Ann Arbor a lot, just felt bigger than a classic "college town" should be. More of a city in its own right... like Madison.

[SIGSEGV]

Boulder is my favorite of flagship state university towns (not counting places like Seattle or Honolulu). Burlington is great too Connecticut must be the worst.

[llamaorama]

And then there's College Station. I lived there when I was in high school and in my early 20s. I did not attend Texas A&M, I went to a local community college and then went to a university elsewhere. My Dad worked for A&M system.

It's the absolute antithesis or opposite of somewhere like Boulder or Ann Arbor.

College Station is named as such because it started out as a train station next to a college. Until the late 1950s it was literally just a gas station at a crossroads and small cluster of houses. So as you can imagine, it's modern form is almost entirely suburban in character. The Brazos Valley is literally a river valley that was and is an important agricultural region, which is all very good, but that also means it's flat.

Texas A&M was a small land grant university that did not become big until the 60s/70s, so it's campus is an imposing brutalist citadel of sorts and the tallest building is probably a decipticon. That's just what it is. Also the campus was very culturally conservative during the "baby boomers go to college" era so the whole hippie/weird college town vibe never took root for better or worse.

It's a very good school and all, I have qualms about it. From my perspective as someone who was from the town side of that community I was happy to get out though.

College Station is expensive due to the rich students and it's hard to get an entry level professional job that isn't underpaid because you have to compete with recent college graduates. The town is run by stuffy old NIMBYs who always vote no on bond elections. Bryan is the other half and a little more interesting, but it's also just kind of poor and meh.

Also despite the evergreen ambitions of leaders in the area(A&M people will tell you they are going to invent carrots that grow on the moon someday that will cure aids), it just isn't winning that hard when it comes to luring in tech or other advanced companies like these other places are. The Bio Corridor plans have only partially materialized and not on the schedule many would like.

It's 250,000 people, it's not super scenic or cool, take it or leave it I guess. SIGSERV will know, he had to live in Palestine for a while. Palestine people drive to Bryan to go to the doctor.

[Omaharocks]

IMO, the best by region:

Midwest: Madison
Great Plains: Lawrence
West: Missoula (Boulder is runner up, but strikes me a bit too much as a nice main st in a suburb)
SE: Athens
NE: Burlington
West Coast: Berkeley
SW: Doesn't do traditional state "college towns"