Ivy covered buildings on expansive countryside lawns are far from the typical college campus.
CityLab broke down 2014 enrollment data from roughly 750 metro and micropolitan locations across the U.S. and found that 55.9 percent of college students (9.5 million) attend a school in a metro with more than one million people. More than a quarter go to a school in one of the nation’s 10 largest metros.
However, a significant portion of students (35.3 percent of all students) still go to a school in what is considered a “classic” college town, which in this sense is a metro that contains between 100,000 and one million people. These cities include Ithaca, N.Y. (Cornell University), State College, Pa. (Penn State), and Bloomington, Ind. (Indiana University).