U.S. College & University POIs
Here is a set of POIs for most of the 4-year colleges and universities in the United States.
I generated this set using the US Dept. of Education’s College Scorecard, a public database of higher-learning institutions and their demographics. My general procedure was to find the total undergraduate and graduate student population, the size and setting of the institution, and the student-faculty ratio. To get the total number of commuters, I calculated the total number of students and faculty using the faculty ratio, then applied a commuter factor of 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, or 0.9 to the student population based on the size and setting – highly residential institutions with ample student housing will have fewer students commuting than less residential or non-residential institutions. Finally, I filtered the results to have a population > 1000 to reduce the number of POIs without sacrificing much population. There are some limitations to this dataset unfortunately:
1. The dataset does not provide data on the share of online vs in-person students, so some institutions that offer online enrollment may have inflated population. I’ve manually adjusted major outliers such as SNHU, Liberty University, and Arizona State. Additionally, major for-profit institutions have been removed from the set due to high online enrollment numbers.
2. The dataset does not separate some college systems – major ones include the Lone Star College System in Texas and Ivy Tech in Indiana. Since branch-level data is not available for many 2-year and community college systems, these institutions have been regretfully ommitted.
This mod adds about 5.5 million in population to the map.
Additionally, I have added a rough demand curve to simulate student traffic. Suggestions are welcome!
