I was talking to UChicago prof who did his undergrad at UIUC, and he said a lot of money was spent to bootstrap the tech economy in Champaign-Urbana but even ba

I was talking to UChicago prof who did his undergrad at UIUC, and he said a lot of money was spent to bootstrap the tech economy in Champaign-Urbana but even back then at the height of the dotcom boom, it didn't make sense to him because most people just did not want to live in the middle of cornfields. Rural colleges (even good ones) that are too far away from a city or a metropolitan area rarely have strong diversified economies because talent just doesn't want to live there. If they did, these places wouldn't remain small. Ann Arbor does reasonably well, but it is close to Detroit (which despite most people's mental images of blight, has a very large suburban population that isn't too different from that of other cities in America). Pittsburgh does reasonably well because it is itself a city. Off the top of my head I can think of many small college towns with good tech programs that have not managed to develop a strong diversified/tech economy: * Ithaca, NY * Providence, RI * West Lafayette, IN * Charlottesville, VA Madison WI does ok for some reason (it's a really idyllic place to live as a student), but even then outside of Epic and a few large employers, it's not really a talent magnet. Historically, the very concept of a university in medieval times arose due to urbanization. Outside of a few exceptions like Oxford/Cambridge, situating universities in rural settings is actually not the default idea. Thomas Jefferson famously despised city life and placed UVa in rural Charlottesville, and other colleges in America followed suit. But most European universities are usually located in cities or towns, and instead of sprawling bucolic campuses, they are spread out all over a city.