Flagship state university towns

[L41A]

Originally Posted by dave8721

In Florida, Gainesville has a decent vibe to it but for a college town that is home to a mid-1800s large public university and another large university AND doubles as a state capital of the nations 3rd largest state, Tallahassee is a dud.

I love Tallahassee.
Tallahassee > Gainesville.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by TWAK

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.

UCLA ranks higher than Berkeley these days in a few of the rankings, including USN&WR, but Berkeley established itself far earlier in history so I'd say it's still the flagship. The only UC in a true college town is Davis, but it's not a flagship.

The only Cal State schools in true college towns are Arcata, Chico, and San Luis Obispo, none of which are considered flagships either.

[SFBruin]

I agree with the above.

[SFBruin]

Delete.

[SIGSEGV]

Anybody have experience with Moscow, ID (or Pullman, WA?). Seems like an interesting part of the country.

[202_Cyclist]

Originally Posted by craigs

UCLA ranks higher than Berkeley these days in a few of the rankings, including USN&WR, but Berkeley established itself far earlier in history so I'd say it's still the flagship. The only UC in a true college town is Davis, but it's not a flagship.

The only Cal State schools in true college towns are Arcata, Chico, and San Luis Obispo, none of which are considered flagships either.

I think UC Berkeley has the best reputation of the UC schools, with UCSD and UCLA also strong schools and close behind. UC Davis offers a strong education and is probably better than many of the flagship state universities in the rest of the country.

I attended Sacramento State for grad school. I think Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is probably the closest thing to a flagship school for the Cal State system.

[10023]

As an alumnus of UW-Madison, it is obviously the finest college town in the Midwest, the United States, and the world.

And I do think it’s still a college town, at least from the perspective of a current student. The Capitol is barely walking distance (at least in the winter) and basically where you go when your parents are in town for a nicer dinner. And all of the suburban growth is really out of sight, out of mind for most students. The western end of State Street, and obviously campus itself, are so utterly dominated by the university and students that you’d never mistake it for anything but a college town. It’s a long way from being a Columbus or Austin which, while they are home to huge universities and impacted culturally by that, are really far too big to be “college towns”.

Ann Arbor and Iowa City are probably the next tier in the Midwest. Champaign never impressed me and West Lafayette flat out sucks.

Beyond the Midwest, I’ve always had a positive impression of Charlottesville, Chapel Hill and Athens. Does anyone know those and Madison well enough to compare them?

[eschaton]

I went to school at UMass Amherst, which is clearly the flagship state university in Massachusetts. It was...fine...as college towns go. Small walkable downtown area considering there were actually three different colleges at that time in town (UMass, Amherst College, and Hampshire College, which has since semi-imploded). By the time I was finishing up I hung out more in nearby Northampton though, which is much more of a small walkable city. There's been some awful New Urbanist shit built in Amherst since I graduated 20 years ago, but any density is good I suppose.

I grew up in Connecticut, but there was no way I'd go to UConn. Storrs has to be the literal worst college town in the country for a flagship university. They built the college in the literal middle of nowhere, with no nearby town. I believe historically people who wanted a "town" experience would live in nearby Willimantic, which is a good 45 minutes away by bus (15 minutes if you drive).

Recently a "fake college town" began being built right off of UConn's campus though. There was literally nothing there other than strip malls till it was built from 2010-2016. Here's a (dated) article about it.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by 10023

Beyond the Midwest, I’ve always had a positive impression of Charlottesville, Chapel Hill and Athens. Does anyone know those and Madison well enough to compare them?

They're all nice. They have that certain feel of being smallish places which offer amenities that only exist there because there is a population of students and highly-educated adults.

Madison is a cool city, but way too big to be considered a college town, to me at least.

[Klippenstein]

Bellingham WA seems like a great example. Western Washington University is the second biggest employer after their big hospital. It has a cute downtown, beautiful scenery, great outdoors scene and is right in between Vancouver and Seattle. Unfortunately, they are very NIMBYish.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by pj3000

They're all nice. They have that certain feel of being smallish places which offer amenities that only exist there because there is a population of students and highly-educated adults.

Madison is a cool city, but way too big to be considered a college town, to me at least.

Yeah, I put Madison in the same bucket as Cambridge, MA, Burlington, VT, Lexington, KY, or Berkeley, CA. They all contain major universities which contribute to the local feel considerably, but they're either enmeshed in larger metro areas or the major city of the region, so they exist for reasons beyond the university.

[Crawford]

Charlottesville is more like an Ithaca or Burlington. Madison is bigger and more cityish; like a bigger, better Ann Arbor.

I feel Ithaca belongs in this conversation, as its about as good as college towns get. But it doesn't meet the rules, as neither Cornell nor Ithaca are state universities.

NY State has a weird setup, where you have two state university systems, and the one system has four flagships, none in traditional college towns, and the other system is 100% urban. And the state land grant university is actually Cornell, obviously a private Ivy League university (though there is some NY State funding and collaboration in some of the colleges per land grant status).

[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.

[Crawford]

College Park is pretty terrible for a college town. It's basically DC postwar suburban sprawl, and there's no identifiable student-centered commercial area.

[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.

[Crawford]

Yeah, Evanston and Ann Arbor aren't similar, at all.

Northwestern is very much a Chicago (or at least Chicagoland) school. Ann Arbor, while technically in the Detroit CSA, isn't a Detroit school, at all. Outside of the airport, I don't think most undergrads have any interaction with Detroit, and the school certainly doesn't market any relationship with Detroit.

Also, IMO Evanston doesn't feel particularly college townish. Feels like an affluent-leaning, economically diverse inner suburb (which it is). If the University of Michigan were in Grosse Pointe, MI, it would sorta feel like Northwestern in Evanston.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by Crawford

College Park is pretty terrible for a college town. It's basically DC postwar suburban sprawl, and there's no identifiable student-centered commercial area.

Yeah, it's kinda awful. So disappointing, especially because it should be so good.

It's really kind of amazing how overall blah the area around the campus is. It has improved along US1, but still far from a "college town" experience.

[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/Catego..._United_States

[Steely Dan]

^ i'd challenge Southern Illinois University's inclusion on that list.

it's a good enough school, but a "flagship" university for the state of illinois?

i'd argue no. it's nowhere remotely close to the prestige level /academic reputation of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

hell, i'd even argue that the Unviersity of Illinois Chicago is now much more of a secondary state flagship than SIU is, at least going by academic reputation.

UIC is the only other R1 public university in illinois, along with UIUC. (U. chicago and northwestern are the other two, but they're both private schools).