If you didn’t already know that Ithaca is the best college town in the country, Livability.com just proved it. The site gave Ithaca the top spot on its 2018 list of the 10 best college towns in the country.
IC students and locals alike take pride in the town and all it has to offer for all types of people. Music lovers can enjoy the rich local music scene. Food lovers can try cuisine from all parts of the globe. Nature lovers can explore more than one hundred natural gorges. And, of course, students can study at one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country.
The article highlights Ithaca as a desirable school because of its student population of 7,000, and because of its origin as a music school that has transformed into a school with more than 100 degree programs.
The piece also described the town as a “nature-lover’s dream” and wrote about popular student hangout spots like the Commons and Cayuga Lake.
For its ranking, Livability.com looked at all 203 towns that have at least one college and a population between 20,000 and 350,000. They used factors like the ratio of the city’s median salary to its July 2018 median one-bedroom rent, the percentage of the population age 20 to 29, the number of jobs in the education sector per 1,000 jobs in the city, and the ratio of the median salary in the city to the nation for education jobs to rank the qualifying towns.