Canada's "university towns"
 

What are the municipalities in Canada where the university student population is at least 10% of the population?

e.g. A university with an enrollment of 15,000 in a city of 100,000. I'm not that interested in where the student's official "home" is, so all 15,000 students at the university count.

There is a list of Canadian College town on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...owns_in_Canada

In Ontario, Waterloo, Kingston and Guelph clearly make the cut.

Waterloo (99,000): University of Waterloo (37,000) and Wilfrid Laurier University (20,000)
Kingston (123,000): Queen's University (22,500)
Guelph (122,000): University of Guelph (21,000 excl. Guelph - Humber)

London and Peterborough are borderline.

Montréal has more than 170,000 university students, which is about 10% of its population.

Well... not that much.
In Quebec, according to the Ministère de l'Éducation et de l'Enseignement supérieur's last statistics on post-secondary studies, the following municipalities could apply :

1. Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue (Montreal CMA) : 122,5%
2. Sainte-Thérèse (Montréal CMA) : 19,8 %
3. La Pocatière : 17,5 %
4. Sherbrooke : 16,7 %
5. Saint-Lambert (Montréal CMA) : 12,9 %
6. Joliette : 12,7%
7. Odanak (Abenaki First Nation village) : 11,8 %
8. Montréal : 11,4 %
9. Rimouski : 10,6 %
10. Trois-Rivières : 10,2 %
11. Québec : 9,8 %

Of big cities in North America, apparently it has the highest number of students per capita.

Ottawa is around 10% students (post-secondary).

Forgot St. Catharines/Brock in Ontario, 18,000 in a population of 131,000.

I went to a college campus in Lawrencetown, NS. The place is only a small village so the students made up around 50% of the population.

How about Columbus, OH and Austin, TX? Or are those cities too small? I suppose it would still be pretty close though, around 6-12% if I had to guess.

I think we're getting College TOWNS confused with College CITIES.

Montreal or Ottawa are way too large to have that classic college town feel.

North Bay has a city population of 54,000 with 5,000 students enrolled at Nipissing University and 3,500 enrolled at Canadore College for a total of 8,500 post secondary students.

I wouldn't say Waterloo really is a college town. It may have 99,000, but it's in a metro of over 500,000 which is a bit big to be considered a college town and makes the post-secondary institutions less predominant, though still prominent. Guelph and Kingston, though, are great examples.

The only place in Alberta that I feel sort-of qualifies is Camrose. It has the UofA's Augustana Campus, which has about 1,000 students for a city of 18,000. So more like 5% of the population. It's kind of like Kitchener-Waterloo, where the university is prominent and important, but not overbearingly predominant. Camrose is still primarily an agricultural and services centre.

You could make the argument for Lethbridge, with UofL, which has 8,000 students in a metro of 100,000. I'd still say that's pushing it as UofL doesn't feel like the centre of life in Lethbridge.

Then there's Athabasca, with Athabasca University, but most of its students are through distance learning online. So it doesn't really qualify.

Major, esteemed universities in the West really popped up in the larger cities -- Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Winnipeg. Increasingly Saskatoon and Calgary. We don't really have an analogue to Kingston, let alone Antigonish.

that was the 1st question
Montréal has more than 300,000 post-secondary students.

Fair enough, I was going by the title which said towns.

Montreal is no town, I think both you and I can agree on that.

In BC, Victoria definitely qualifies (population 80,000; 21,000 students at UVic). Oddly Burnaby would qualify as well by a strict "10%" criteria (SFU has around 25,000 students) but few would argue it is a "university town."

no, Montréal is no ''town'', but when September comes, the city is a lot more alive with all the students coming into town. If you had to visit Montréal, September is the best time.

I made this chart a while back. Uses CMA borders and university enrollment numbers. Not quiet scientific (little things like the enrollment data often being from 2012 whereas census is from 2011, etc.) but a guideline.

Total number of university students per 1,000 people in each CMA
https://s29.postimg.org/smd6nykgn/image.png

Kingston & Guelph are both over 10% university students in their entire metros. Kitchener-Waterloo and Sherbrooke come very close.

Of the big six, Ottawa tops the list.

Lethbridge, Alberta comes to mind. They are around 100K population and both the U of L and Lethbridge College make up at least 12-15% of the total population (combined) during the school year.

Yeah....no. It seems like people are looking at hard, arbitrary lines in the sand, with city propers, rather than looking at metro-wide numbers. Victoria isn't really 80,000 and Burnaby is really an extension of Vancouver. Universities are a perfect example of this. UVic and SFU would not have the population of students they do without the surrounding metropolitan area. It's very simplistic to assume all or even most UVic or SFU students live within the confines of the City of Victoria and City of Burnaby.