What I learned in Manhattan (Kansas)
Small college towns can have nice things!
One of the major differences between Canada and the United States is college towns. Canada has some relatively small cities with universities and colleges, but outside of Atlantic Canada we don’t have many small cities that are completely dominated by higher ed.
Ontario universities are mainly concentrated in large cities. We have universities in some smaller cities, but they tend to be small. By contrast, many of America’s largest, most prestigious public universities are in smaller cities. Consider Kansas State University (K State) in Manhattan, Kansas, a town of 54,000 about 120 miles west of Kansas City.
When I lived in Winnipeg, I spent a lot of time on the I-29 corridor, which runs from North Dakota down to Kansas City. I first visited Manhattan on a lark. My partner and I were planning to visit the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The weather did not cooperate, to put it mildly. Massive floods shut down the highway, so we were stuck in Topeka, Kansas, wondering what to do for the night.
As I stared at the map, I recognized a name: Manhattan. No, not because it shares a name with the word’s greatest city. I recognized the name from the label of Tallgrass IPA. This was about a decade ago, when you couldn’t just walk into any town and find a good brewery. So, what the heck.
We didn’t expect to find much more than a brewery and maybe somewhere to get a decent meal if we were lucky. Instead we found wine bars, nice restaurants, and walkable urbanism. What gives?
One of the nice things about having a large university in a small city is it presents opportunities for good urbanism. In a typical American city of 50 thousand, you wouldn’t expect much walkable urbanism. But because Manhattan is a college town and most students don’t own vehicles, the City needs to make it relatively easy for students on campus to get around on foot. Did I mention there are 19,000 students at K State? That’s a lot of pedestrians and cyclists to accommodate for a small city.
It’s not just the students that make it usually walkable either. Or at least, that’s not my interpretation.
Manhattan has two night life districts. One of them - Aggieville - is right across from the K State campus. It’s where the students go, which is obvious based on the wings and pubs vibe. Manhattan Town Center is a bit more upscale. It seems more geared towards faculty and staff. Profs need somewhere to eat too! Faculty paychecks probably go pretty far in small town Kansas, which probably helps support the service industry. You don’t tend to see two walkable night life areas in comparably sized Ontario cities. Sometimes there isn’t even one.
The Ontario mind cannot comprehend American college towns. Ontario does have universities in cities that aren’t much larger than Manhattan. But the campus are neither as large nor as well funded.
The closest examples I can think of in Ontario are Sault Ste. Marie (72,000) and North Bay (52,600). They both have universities, but their student populations are a small fraction of K State (3225 and 4609, respectively). There are roughly 22 locals to every student in Sault Ste. Marie, and 11 to one in North Bay. In Manhattan, there are roughly three locals to every student. Factor in people employed directly by the school and indirect jobs in the service sector (from restaurants to medical services), and K State basically is the city. There’s no Ontario equivalent.
Now, K State isn’t Harvard. But no one will dispute that it is a high quality state university. It provides a full slate of undergraduate programs and a lineup of graduate programs that would make most small city Canadian university administrators blush. This is one of the hidden strengths of American higher education: you don’t need to move to Boston or New York to get a high quality education. You can get a good education in most states with a reasonable in-state tuition rate. Public universities are a major engine of social mobility in America.
Canadian universities are a very different story. We don’t have the low-quality degree mills that you can find stateside. But we have few universities outside of small cities, and we don’t invest in them. As we saw with Laurentian University’s financial challenges, higher education outside of a handful of prestigious schools is an afterthought in Ontario.
One of the reasons I keep coming back to American college towns is that they present an alternative to small town decline. We take it for granted in Ontario that smaller cities outside of commuting distance to Toronto are destined for failure. I disagree.
Most states have at least one great college town. Not just in big states like New York and California, but in smaller states like North Dakota and West Virginia. The formula isn’t that complicated. People go to universities for the school, not so much the city. In Canada, we just happen to invest our higher ed dollars in large cities. That’s a choice, and one we should reconsider as our largest metro areas get pricier and our smaller metro areas decline.
We’ve already got several smaller cities with universities. We should make growing them a long-term priority. Education doesn’t have to be a big city luxury.
Even the most prestigious group of American universities -- the Ivies -- don’t have all campuses in big cities. Cornell and Princeton are in small cities and completely dominated by these universities.
It’s definitely a stark different from Canada, where, yeah you only have this a bit in the Maritimes.
In Ontario, the closest I can think of to this kind of experience is Kingston. But Kingston’s a lot larger and even though it does feel like the city is sort of purpose-built for Queen’s students at times, there are other things going on, including most notably, military. Kingston is more like an Ann Arbor or Madison than Manhattan or Lawrence or Ithaca or State College, though.
In Manitoba, there’s Brandon University but it’s more like your Northern Ontario examples where it doesn’t really dominate the city so much.