Game 6: Saturday, October 7, 2023 | Michigan vs. Minnesota| Huntington Bank Stadium | 7:30 PM EST
Ann Arbor SPARK’s popular football blog series is back for Michigan’s 144th season! We use the football season as an opportunity to compare Ann Arbor to cities around the country represented by our U-M football competition. The question is always – how does Ann Arbor compare to other college towns in the U.S.?
Welcome to October! This weekend, the Little Brown Jug is on the line during a night game where the Gophers host the Wolverines. The Wolverines enter the match with a perfect record and a No. 2 ranking.
Together with Falcon Heights, where a portion of UMTC resides, Minneapolis forms a significant urban hub. With its sibling city, Saint Paul, they form the Twin Cities metro area – a whopping 3.5 million residents. This metropolitan expanse is the third-largest in the Midwest, tailing only Detroit and Chicago. The city alone is nearly four times the size of Ann Arbor in terms of population!
Minneapolis is home to several Fortune 500 giants like Target, 3M, and U.S. Bancorp. Its diversified economy encompasses finance, commerce, health services, and transportation.
- UMTC has a slightly larger student body enrollment than that of the University of Michigan (52,376 vs 50,278, respectively).
- The unemployment rate in Ann Arbor is slightly higher at 3.9 percent compared to 3.2 percent in Minneapolis (August 2023).
- In Minneapolis, only 52.6 percent of the population over the age of 25 possess a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to 77.2 percent in Ann Arbor.
- The median household income in Minneapolis is $70,099 compared to $73,276 in Ann Arbor and Ann Arbor is more affordable in terms of cost of living (cost of living index of 115.1 vs 99.9).
Be on the lookout for our blog posts ahead of each game all season long and be sure to tag us when you share these interesting tidbits with your friends via social media! And, if you want more information like this or are curious to learn more about the Ann Arbor region and what makes it such a great place to live, work, and locate your business, please reach out to our Director of Research, Melissa Sheldon.
In case you missed it, here are links to the regional comparisons we’ve posted so far this year:
Benchmarking the Ann Arbor Region: 2023 Economic Competitive Assessment
Game 1: Ann Arbor vs. Greenville, NC
Game 2: Ann Arbor vs. Las Vegas, NV
Game 3: Ann Arbor vs. Bowling Green, OH
Game 4: Ann Arbor vs. New Brunswick, NJ
Game 5: Ann Arbor vs. Lincoln, NE
