The best college towns

Community profiler ePodunk ranked the top college towns in their College Town Index. Focusing on the community rather than the colleges, some of the criteria include restaurants; book, music and periodical stores; entertainment offerings; and publishers, recording studios and other information-oriented companies, among the usual economic demographics.

A summary of the rankings:

Big Cities
1 Boston-Cambridge, MA
2 Minneapolis, MN
3 Denver, CO
4 Columbus, OH
5 Seattle, WA

Medium-Sized Cities
1 Columbia, SC
2 Tallahassee, FL
3 Madison, WI
4 Urbana-Champaign, IL
5 Ann Arbor, MI

Small Cities
1 Charlottesville, VA
2 Bozeman, MT
3 Hays, KS
4 Boulder, CO
5 Missoula, MT

Towns
1 Hanover, NH
2 Princeton, NJ
3 Brookings, SD
4 Middlebury, VT
5 Durango, CO

The full list, criteria and individual college town profiles are right here.

Image: How about Athens, GA?