Florida has the most with five. Texas has four. California and Michigan have three. Arizona, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Utah have two. Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin all have one.
The data on this is inexact, so I will also mention cases that are close: One in Louisiana, one more in Virginia, one more in Indiana, and three more in California.
First guess: public universities with compass directions in their names.
Nah, Oregon has like five of them.
Oregon is curiously not very close to being on this list. When this is over, you can explain to me why.
Something to do with water sports or water-based recreation?
John McCain/Kerry second homes? (Inexact == Condos)
Tuesday Hint: It’s one of those metrics that you think would track with population, though doesn’t precisely. Utah is closer to its second than Oregon is to its first.
Could this be a county-based metric?
My general policy is to think about things Michigan has, since that’s my comparative advantage. I also, for some reason, have decided this is about universities in some way. So let’s go with… large research universities? Something like over $100 million spent annually on research?
This doesn’t really work because the Ivies aren’t present in the clues. Make it public research universities, I guess.
You don’t have it quite yet. But you’re hovering right around it.
Grr… something about enrollment? >30K?
Yeah, public universities (offering more than BS/BA) with an enrollment of over 30K. Wayne State is the third in Michigan, which I’d only barely ever heard of. Florida has a lot because they have so few universities, while California and Ohio have their student populations split up into a lot of universities of 20-30k students.
Wayne State is what gave it away for me. There aren’t a lot of things Michigan almost-uniquely has three of (auto makers was clearly not the correct answer to this), but the universities divide somewhat neatly between UM/MSU/WSU and EMU/CMU/WMU. Once I got rid of the directionals, I just had to find the thing that picked out the former three.
And where do Ferris and Lake State fit in to your scheme? The schools everyone forgets about? 😉
I don’t know – the rest? I’d put Ferris, Lake State, Northern, Tech, Grand Valley, et al into a big bucket of “everyone else”. They aren’t major research centers, they’re small, they don’t have division I football, they’re much more oriented around undergraduate education, etc.
I actually use EMU as one of my comparatively small sample-set of schools that have Division I football but probably shouldn’t.
There’s also the other two campuses of UM that no one has ever heard of: Dearborn and Flint. About 8k each.
Public universities that are do not teach undergraduates? I know California well — Hastings College of Law, UCSF Medical School, and the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Lawrence Livermore might be one of the marginal cases, since it’s a partnership with some other entities.
I think you could have set the number at 40,000 and still have 5 in Florida:
UF (U of FL), FSU (FL State U), FIU (FL Internat. U), USF (U South FL), and UCF (U Central FL). My daughter went to UF and it’s so overcrowded that the admissions requirements are rising fast to control the explosive growth.
Indeed so. Florida is going to need to figure something out. Either build more schools or turn the smaller set (UWF, UNF, FGCU) into the larger set. It actually represents a unique opportunity for some of the historically lesser-known schools to pick up the students who wanted to go to a UF/FSU to land there instead. I don’t think it’s a mistake that they’ve been falling all over themselves starting up football programs. A kid who wanted to go to UF is more likely to go to FIU if it has one, and is more likely to be the “traditional student” that commuter colleges often crave.