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Originally Posted by the urban politician
^ Yeah, apparantly Columbia has a huge space crunch. They have a LOT of expansion plans on the table, which is pretty exciting.
My only problem with this article is that they've chosen a pretty arbitrary set of boundaries for this "largest college town in Illinois". I wonder how much larger the student populations would be if they included other "central area" hoods such as Streeterville, River North, and UIC.
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I wondered the same thing when I first came across this report. Geek that I am, I actually tried to find out the answer. Here are the numbers I was able to come up with. Some are incomplete estimates because schools like Loyola and Northwestern, don't report separate enrollment figures for their downtown campuses, only for the various schools/programs on those campuses.
-UIC: 25,000
-Northwestern (Streeterville): 2700
-Loyola (River North):1400 in Law School, Business School and Education. Other programs, enrollments unknown
-Illinois Institute of Art (in the Apparel Center): 2600
-Argosy University (in the Apparel Center): 1000
-IIT (West Loop): 1325 in Law and Business schools. Urban Planning enrollment unknown
-Chicago Cooking and Hospitality Institute (River North): 1050
-Erikson Institute (River North): 300
-University of Chicago (River North) 2000
TOTAL: 37,375+
In addition, the report quoted in the article also left out several schools/programs that are in the geographic area they covered, namely the MBA programs of Notre Dame, University of Illlinois (not UIC's Liataud Business School), and Keller. The Notre Dame MBA program is relatively new, so that's probably why it wasn't included.
Adding in what's missing probably gets you to 39,000 or 40,000, which is like adding another college town to the Central Area.
For what it's worth, I would exclude UIC from this count just because it is so physically separated from the Central Area by the expressway and so very much it's own community because of its size and distance from the Loop. Even the most generous definitions of the Central Area rarely extend west of Halsted.
But even without UIC, you're still talking about an additional 10-15,000 people if you just include River North/Streeterville and the West Loop.