Big School, Little City, Great College Town

So yesterday I made what has become a pretty regular trip to the Subway across the street from campus.  Considering it is only 5 minutes from the pharmacy building I have been there quite a few times for lunch this summer.  Anyway, I enjoy this Subway for many reasons.  First, it has two lines and an upstairs dining area, fancy!  Second, since it is across from Mackey Arena and the sports training facilities I see many Purdue athletes and coaches.

But yesterday I was in line behind a new student who was here to tour campus with her mother and I believe aunt.  Yes I was creepin’ into their conversation a little bit but I didn’t throw myself into their talk nor did I stare or make it obvious that I was creepin’, minus the time I laughed at them making fun of the cheerleaders in front of us ordering just “lettuce.”  Anyway, they were discussing a bunch of things about campus because I think the aunt met them for lunch and they were catching her up on the morning.  They talked about extra-curricular activities and BGR (Boiler Gold Rush, the freshman orientation program).  But what sparked my enthusiasm to write this post was their perspective on how big the campus is here.  They couldn’t get over how large the campus was and how confusing the streets were.

[Side note – The streets here are pretty confusing and I believe that the first Purdue engineers designed the campus streets a type of IQ test to keep stupid people from attending Purdue, but whatever.]

Purdue Mall on campus.

Anyway, I have always thought Purdue is great because that is all that is here.  West Lafayette is Purdue and vice versa.  Everything here revolves around the college life; even the Wal-Mart close to campus has a completely different feel to it than most Wal-Marts.  So when I hear someone talking about how big it is I immediately think, it could be so much worse.  I have visited IU and Wisconsin a couple of times and those campuses and cities are so much larger than Purdue, not to mention I have heard stories about Ohio St and how it takes 30 minutes to get from one end of campus to the other, by car!

Now I could talk about how much I love Purdue and all it has to offer has both a school and a community but, in my true scientific nature, I have decided to collect some data to analyze and test my hypothesis that, “Purdue is a large school with a small school feel, comparatively.”  That gives Purdue a unique experience that is hard to find, with both vast opportunities and small town charm.  I could go on and on about Purdue and West Lafayette but I will focus on how it compares to the rest of the B1G TEN.

First let’s look at the size of the schools…

Stupid Indiana, messing up my graph!

This first graph compares the student population size (blue line) to the “listed size” of the campus.  Now if you aren’t familiar with the B1G TEN, here is a crash course.  All 12 Universities are large public universities (minus Northwestern) which are very prestigious academically.  They all are a part of the Association of American Universities which is devoted to academics and research (Nebraska isn’t yet but they are new to the B1G Ten and will hopefully be striving for that honor).  Outside of Northwestern, all of the schools have large student bodies (Northwestern is about half undergrads, half graduate students) and have large financial support for both research and athletics.  Things that stand out in this graph…

1. Ohio State has by far the largest campus size while Wisconsin and Northwestern surprise because that are both in larger cities (Madison and Evanston/Chicago).

2. OSU is the only school to have a campus listed has over 10 square miles.

3. Nebraska is not as big as I thought in both population and campus size.

Now let’s compare the school population to the size of the city that the school calls home…

Well, somewhat similar.  Again ordered by school population size here are the things that stuck out to me…

1. Columbus, OH is by far the largest city. 

2. Since NW calls Evanston home that city is fairly small since it is essentially a small suburb of Chicago.

3. Wisconsin and Nebraska both shot up the chart along with Minnesota, but no real surprises as those are all major cities (Madison, Lincoln, and Minneapolis respectively).

4. Purdue and PSU  are in tiny towns comparatively.  Actually, Penn State is listed as being in University Park which is at 1.5 square miles.  However, their listed campus size is 8.5 square miles.  Uh?  Evidently their city limits are smaller than their campus limits, not to mention that 1.5 square miles is practically nothing. So the size of Penn State’s city will be the larger of the two (8.5 square miles) for this “research.”

Ok, well we have established that OSU is huge, Northwestern is small, and everyone else usually falls in the middle somewhere.  Now let’s look at one more graph before making a decision on whether or not Purdue has a large or small “feel.”

The line is the amount of students per square mile of city since the students usually live in and around the campus, not just on campus.  I sorted it from most to least students.  The bars represent the amount of the city that the campus actually takes up.  Penn State is leveled off at 1.0 because it’s campus is supposedly larger than the city it is in.  My thoughts…

1. Purdue, PSU, and MSU are head and shoulders above everyone else in both cases.  These schools are in college towns and that is essentially all that is there.  Also, taking into account the amount of students these campuses/cities are relatively small compared to other schools of this size (IU, Illinois, Mich, Minn)

2. Again, Columbus is huge and even though they have lots of students they still barely crack 250 students per square mile (remember student numbers are in thousands)

3. Nebraska is befuddling to me but I think it must feel huge because it is the only thing in Nebraska.  Too mean?

4. Northwestern is located in a small suburb so it probably feels much smaller than most schools here because it has half the students and a tiny campus (0.4).

Overall, I think it is easy to tell that Purdue is actually not the “large” in comparison to other schools in the Midwest.  MSU and PSU are similar institutions and have similar feels in that they are located in cities that are essentially just the University.  I feel Purdue has a small feel to it once you live here for about 6 months and become accustomed to the college town life.  I love that Purdue has nearly 40,000 students and yet we all within 10 minutes from each other around town.   So parents, the next time you find yourself lost at Purdue just think what those poor kids who happen to go to Wisconsin, Ohio State, or heaven forbid IU feel like?

Notes:

-  I understand that this data has been subjectively looked at and I have done this whole analysis in about 3 hours of time. 

-All data was collected from Wikipedia.org, which everyone knows is the most credible source in the world.

- Yes, West Lafayette is close to Lafayette, but under that logic you would have to include Chicago for NW, St Paul for Minnesota, Urbana for Illinois, about 8 small towns for PSU.

- My goal here was not to belittle any University.  You must find the correct fit for you and the part of that fit is whether you want the city experience (like Madison, WI, Chicago, IL, or Columbus, OH) or you want college town (West Lafayette, IN, University Park, PA, or East Lansing, MI).  And for those of you who don’t know what you want there are plenty of in between schools.  Also, the B1G TEN is the home to some fo the largest public schools in the country, so there are many other schools which reside in “college towns” as well.  I just wanted to point out the relatively, Purdue is small compared to other schools with this amount of students and prestige.

- Lastly, this does not take into account the population of these cities, nor does it account for where exactly people live.  Obviously OSU has a higher student density than 260 students per square mile because nobody is going to live on the other side of town from the main campus buildings.  The point here is to emphasize how large the actual cities are in comparison to how large the school is.  For example, for West Lafayette to “feel” as big as Columbus, it would need to have about 1500 students.  There are 2254 students registered for the Freshman Chemistry class, CHM 115, this fall (about 450 students per lecture class).

Thoughts anyone, I’d love to hear what everyone else thinks too!