urbanSTL

St. Louis has a student population of over 150k.

Not in the city limits where it matters.

moorlander wrote:According to this report St. Louis has a student population of over 150k. We're near the top of the list nationally.

"The next several metros are a bit more surprising. Dallas-Fort Worth and Miami are the nation's seventh and eighth largest college towns respectively, with roughly 380,000 students each. San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston, and Detroit are each home to more than 300,000 college students, while San Diego, Riverside, Phoenix, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Seattle, and Baltimore all host more than 200,000 collegians. St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and several other metros have more than 150,000. "


http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/08/a ... owns/3054/

Most of those seem right but the DFW and Detroit numbers seem pretty "off".

goat314 wrote:Dallas and Houston don't surprise me. A metro of 5-6 million people will likely have a huge community college system consisting of tens of thousands of students.

Fair point. I was thinking big schools. They must be lumping Ann Arbor into the Detroit area count.

Plus maybe they're counting students at places DeVry, University of Phoenix etc.?

Do we really need Saint Louis State University? Why not:
-let Wash U expand? Just wait until they can't build any more and buy Fontbonne University as well as Concordia Seminary
-keep SLU expanding. And I'm not talking about grass lots, fountains, fences and gates.
-help move UMSL from Normandy to the North Side
-help move Webster downtown.

We do need it. Big state U is good for 50k.

Wash U is private, semi-Ivy. This limits its scale and impact, though growth would be good.
It is good for SLU to expand. They are one college.
Moving UMSL will never happen, the state won't allow it.
Seriously growing H-S would be a starting point, but there's the state again.
If push comes to shove, WG won't let Webster go, even if they have been acting like NIMBY crybabies lately.

-Colorado's main university campus is basically in a suburb of Denver. Minnesota's main campus is right in the heart of Minneapolis with a satellite campus (agriculture and biology IIRC) in St. Paul.

Just because we don't have a big U doesn't mean we can't have one and shouldn't bust our asses to get one. The fact that we don't have state gov, and what appears to be a shrinking corporate footprint, makes it do or die to have this. Fifty years ago already.

dweebe wrote:

goat314 wrote:Dallas and Houston don't surprise me. A metro of 5-6 million people will likely have a huge community college system consisting of tens of thousands of students.

Fair point. I was thinking big schools. They must be lumping Ann Arbor into the Detroit area count.

Probably. wrt the Detroit area, it does have some decent-sized campuses... Wayne State probably is as about as large as SLU and WashU combined, and UM-Dearborn and University of Detroit are decent-sized as well. And then if you throw in Eastern Michigan and UM's Ann Arbor campus in neighboring Washtenaw County, that's another 75K plus.

The city I'm jealous of though is Pittsburgh.... Carnegie-Mellon is their WashU and Duquesne is their SLU. But they also have freaking Pitt in town, a top-quality school with 30K more bodies. My understanding is that Pitt has also been pretty instrumental in the highly-regarded robotics industry in town.

Do we really need Saint Louis State University? Why not:
-let Wash U expand? Just wait until they can't build any more and buy Fontbonne University as well as Concordia Seminary
-keep SLU expanding. And I'm not talking about grass lots, fountains, fences and gates.
-help move UMSL from Normandy to the North Side
-help move Webster downtown]

The idea of moving UMSL and or Webster is about as logical as it is likely to happen. Both contribute greatly to the region and yes the city already. If you want to poach universities from outside ST. Louis why not look outside the region since they are about as easy to move as a university inside the region and makes about as much sense. Move Truman state to north city and muck downtown... Better yet you want a university in north city... How about expanding support for Rankin Tech which is already there. You want one downtown. Stevens institute is on Wash Ave. How about growing that. Better yet merge Stevens with Missouri Tech (St. Charles) and move them to Chouteau's landing. It's completely impractical to move either UMSL or Webster they are well established and have way to many facilities where they are.

We should also acknowledge that some progress is being made with moving some programs downtown (or close by).

We've had Webster down there for a number of years and evidently poised to expand its presence, SLU Law moved to Tucker, AT Still will be opening a rather large dental school program at the old City Hospital site, and UMSL moved its Public Radio studios to Grand Center. Hopefully we'll see more of these types of moves.

I'd love to see Harris-Stowe move it business school out of the out-of-the-way spot by Hampton & 44 -- that one should be pretty easy. More difficult, but I think ultra-cool, would be to sell off the Forest Park campus of Saint Louis Community College and relocate it closer to downtown in a redevelopment spot.... maybe within Northside Regeneration. The state could chip in with bonding $$ for new construction and help make it a marquee community college. I think this would be a win-win; getting valuable property into the hands of mixed-use developers and creating a more vibrant experience for the students.