Best College Cities

Colleges and universities, with the libraries, cafes and bars that surround campus life.

22 cities ranked in the United States.

Rank	City	Population	Score
1	Seattle, WA King County	780,995	95.2
2	Nashville-Davidson, TN Davidson County	704,963	84.1
3	Charlotte, NC Mecklenburg County	943,476	77.8
4	Columbus, OH Franklin County	933,263	77.4
5	Denver, CO Denver County	729,019	77.0
6	Oklahoma City, OK Oklahoma County	712,919	76.2
7	Austin, TX Travis County	993,588	73.8
8	Indianapolis, IN Marion County	891,484	63.5
9	Philadelphia, PA Philadelphia County	1,573,916	59.5
10	Fort Worth, TX Tarrant County	1,008,106	56.4
11	Dallas, TX Dallas County	1,326,087	50.4
12	San Antonio, TX Bexar County	1,526,656	48.0
13	Jacksonville, FL Duval County	1,009,833	43.7
14	San Jose, CA Santa Clara County	997,368	42.1
15	Houston, TX Harris County	2,390,125	32.9
16	New York, NY Kings County	8,478,072	31.0
17	Chicago, IL Cook County	2,721,308	30.2
18	San Diego, CA San Diego County	1,404,452	24.6
19	Los Angeles, CA Los Angeles County	3,878,704	23.0
20	El Paso, TX El Paso County	681,723	22.2
21	Las Vegas, NV Clark County	678,922	9.9
22	San Francisco, CA San Francisco County	827,526	1.2

How this ranking works

Each metric is scored 0-100 by percentile against the other ranked cities, then blended using these weights:

Colleges per 10,000 residents ×3
Libraries per 10,000 residents ×1
Cafes per 10,000 residents ×1
Bars per 10,000 residents ×1

Place counts cover a 5 km radius around each city's center, so cities are compared like for like. Scores are relative to the cities in our dataset. About the data.