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As a full-time resident of Boulder, CO (college town), this seems like an impossible situation. I can well imagine that the university here is under heavy press
by davesque 6y ago
As a full-time resident of Boulder, CO (college town), this seems like an impossible situation. I can well imagine that the university here is under heavy pressure from local government to hold classes in the fall. This is because going a semester without all the students/faculty will be disastrous for the town's economy. On the other hand, the increase in coronavirus cases will also be disastrous. I don't have an answer. But, as a person who recently bought their first home in the area, I'm pretty bummed at the prospect of the local economy collapsing.
- kleinsch 6y agoWe’re moving to Boulder next month. With houses starting at $800K and larger houses going for $1.5M+, it seems like the local economy must be driven as much by the tech companies that flocked to Boulder bc of the school as by the school itself.
- davesque 6y agoI've lived here for about 30 years and I really doubt Boulder would last long without the university. And when I said "home", I meant condo, not house. The average tech employee in Boulder is still a long way away from house ownership in town. The real estate prices are not primarily explained by the tech scene.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xenonite 6y agoUsually, the tech companies in college cities are driven by university graduates. It is not hard to guess what happens after a while.
- ashtonkem 6y agoBoulder at least is relatively well to do and has close economic ties to Denver, a lot of other college towns would be economically worse off if college stayed close. Lafayette Indiana (Purdue) and Athens Ohio (OU) come to mind, although there are others.
- OldHand2018 6y agoI think you are generally correct but need a lot more nuance in your examples. Purdue is an R1 school with around 50k students in a metro area of over 150k non-students. It is the largest employer in the metro, but the large factories in the area employee far more in total. It's probably a lot more like Boulder than you think. Boulder is an hour from Denver, but Lafayette is an hour from Indianapolis (a larger city than Denver) and an hour and a half from Chicago. Ohio U is an R2 school with around 30k students in a metro area of around 30k non-students. It's nowhere near any large city and doesn't have more than a small handful of other medium-sized employers. The economic effect of no students on campus for a year would look vastly different between these two cities.
- AdrianB1 6y agoSo it is not about education, just about the money. When people started to call college education a massive scam I disagreed, but I start to understand some of their points.