Our football blog series is back! Like last year, we’re using the football season as an impetus to ask ourselves how we stack up against other, similar regions. How does Ann Arbor compare to other college towns in the US?
The last days of summer…so far the forecast is hot for Saturday, let’s hope it holds for game four! Michigan vs. Purdue – Wolverines vs. Boilermakers.
West Lafayette, Indiana, is less than half the size of Ann Arbor, but similar in many ways. We are alike in educational attainment (no doubt due to the presence of a Big 10 school), and lots of natural beauty, but West Lafayette is much smaller!
Another thing we share is a love of innovation. Not unlike the North Campus Research Complex, West Lafayette and Purdue University have collaboratively built the 650-acre Purdue Research Park. Established in 1961, it is home to more than 100 high-tech companies with 2,500 employees and offers state-of-the-art communications infrastructure, research facilities, a business incubation complex to help start-up firms, and scenic walking trails and lakes. It is billed as “the largest university-affiliated incubation complex in the country.”
For anyone interested in data visualization and transparency, Purdue has an online “Data Digest” full of dashboards on all sorts of University metrics. (And before we get angry commenters, U of M also has this, but it’s not interactive, so therefore less fun).
Enjoy the game!
ICYMI – Here are links to this year’s series on our athletic (and economic) competition!
