D.C. displaces Boston as third-best college town

In collegiate terms, this is almost as big as Los Angeles eclipsing Chicago as Second City:

An annual College Destinations Index now posits the District as the nation's third-best college town, behind San Francisco and New York and -- get this -- ahead of Boston.

Compiled by the American Institute for Economic Research, the index examines 222 metropolitan areas with student populations of 15,000 or more to find the 75 "best towns and cities to live in if you're a college student."

Common wisdom might suggest that those rankings be reversed. To many, Boston is known first and foremost as a college town. New York, San Francisco and especially Washington are known primarily for other things -- many other things, in the case of New York, one other thing (government) in the case of Washington.

Cities are ranked according to 12 factors, including the concentration of students, their diversity, cost of living and earning potential in each would-be college town.

San Francisco leads the list of college destinations among metropolitan areas of 2.5 million or more, followed by New York, Washington and Boston. (Rounding out the top 10: Seattle, Baltimore, L.A., San Diego, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Philadelphia.)

The District ranked fourth on last year's list, behind Boston.

The release doesn't say how the District managed to pass Boston, but I suspect it has to do with the economy. The District has fared comparatively well in the downturn; this region is said to be somewhat recession-proof.

To wit: D.C. ranks first among major metro areas on the index for unemployment rate, second for per-capita income and first for its "creative class," or the share of residents working in the arts, education, knowledge industries, science, engineering and related fields.

The District ranks second in degree attainment, or share of the young population with college degrees. (We happen to know from other sources that the D.C. region is the best-educated metro area in the nation overall.)

The District and its suburbs are home to at least 140,000 college students, according to the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area; one in eight D.C. residents attends college.

"We are a college destination," said John Childers, president of the consortium, for an article I wrote about the AIER index last year. "People are attracted in sort of a self-perpetuating cycle."

The researchers who produce the index told me then that Washington ranked high for concentration of college-age students, with 81 students for every 1,000 residents in the region at the time of last year's index.

San Jose topped the list of mid-size college towns, metro areas of 1 million to 2.5 million residents, followed by Austin, Tex., and Raleigh, N.C.

Boulder, Colo., ranked first among smallish college towns, followed by Ann Arbor, Mich. and Bridgeport, Conn.

The broader purpose of the index is to offer students an alternative to the standard collegiate rankings. Most rankings focus on the institution itself. This one focuses entirely on the city that surrounds it.

"[L]ike the colleges themselves, the towns and cities in which they are located vary widely in the opportunities they offer students and recent graduates," said Keming Liang, lead researcher on the index, in the release.

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