Large Campuses

I recently discovered Cool Colleges by Donald Asher, an extremely well researched handbook on schools for “the hyper-intelligent, self-directed, late blooming and just plain different." A long-time career consultant, Mr. Asher makes no apologies for having very well defined and specific opinions on colleges and the college-going experience. For example, one of Asher’s firmly-held beliefs is that large universities are not good places for students as undergraduates:

“…in large universities students are more likely to report being lonely and isolated, more likely to drop out, more likely to be taught by a graduate assistant than a professor, more likely to cheat, more likely to be unable to name even one friend from college ten years after graduation, less likely to go to graduate school, more likely to be unable to get needed classes, more likely to work more than ten hours a week, and more likely to go through all four or five years of their education without really being changed….”(p. 7)

OK, I’ll buy some of that. But to be fair, there are kids who really thrive in the large school atmosphere, and it’s important to go the extra mile to see if those kinds of matches will work for the individual student. As a service to his readers, Asher includes a list of the largest colleges/universities, but it’s a little out of date. Thanks to the eager research arm of Wikipedia and the US Department of Education, however, I am able to provide more current information:

Largest Public University Campuses as of Fall 2008*
Ranking	University	Location	Enrollment
1	The Ohio State University	Columbus, Ohio	53,715
2	Arizona State University	Tempe, Arizona	52,734
3	University of Florida	Gainesville, Florida	51,413
4	University of Minnesota	Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN	51,141
5	University of Central Florida	Orlando, Florida	50,254
6	University of Texas at Austin	Austin, Texas	50,006
7	Texas A&M University	College Station, TX	48,029
8	Michigan State University	East Lansing, MI	46,648
9	University of South Florida	Tampa, Florida	46,174
10	Pennsylvania State University	University Park, PA	44,406
11	University of Washington	Seattle, Washington	42,113
12	University of Wisconsin-Madison	Madison, Wisconsin	42,041
13	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Urbana-Champaign, IL	42,025
14	University of Michigan	Ann Arbor, MI	41,028
15	Purdue University	West Lafayette, IN	40,485

Largest Private University Campuses as of Fall 2008*
Ranking	University	Location	Enrollment
1	New York University	New York, NY	38,391
2	Brigham Young University	Provo, Utah	34,126
3	University of Southern California	Los Angeles, California	33,500
4	Boston University	Boston, Massachusetts	32,735
5	Liberty University	Lynchburg, Virginia	32,222
6	Nova Southeastern University	Fort Lauderdale, FL	28,796
7	Columbia University	New York, NY	25,495
8	Northeastern University	Boston, Massachusetts	24,752
9	DePaul University	Chicago, Illinois	24,352
10	Long Island University	Brooklyn, NY	24,170
11	University of Pennsylvania	Philadelphia, PA	24,107
12	George Washington University	Washington, DC	22,710
13	Harvard University	Cambridge, MA	22,558
14	Cornell University	Ithaca, NY	20,883
15	Syracuse University	Syracuse, NY	19,366

*Note these lists include single 4-year university campuses with a single physical location. Thus the University of Phoenix and other multiple campus post-secondary schools are not counted.