SmartAssets has ranked Ames as the ninth best college town out of 108 towns

      How was this study conducted?

• Collected data from every U.S. town or city that is the home to a four year college or university.
• Since places such as New York City would be included in the data from up above which had a lot of colleges and Universities. SmartAssets decided to narrow it down even more. They focused on towns that had a population of at least 25,000 or more.
• This left 108 college towns across the country that were conducted in this study.
• Within those 108 towns they studied the same five metrics in each town: the violent crime rate, property crime rate, unemployment rate, median household income subtracted from the median housing costs, and the number of entertaining and dining establishments per 10,000 residents.

                Where did the Data Come From?

• • Data for the violent crime rates, and the property crime rates came from local police department websites and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting database.
  • The unemployment rates came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • Median annual income, median annual housing costs, and the number of entertaining and dining establishments came from the U.S. Census Bureau.

• To calculate each of the towns in the study SmartAssets decided to average each of those those five metrics. They decided to combine the rankings for violent crime and poverty crime rates. Violent crime rates was given 70% and poverty crime rates were given a 30% weight. The three other metrics (unemployment rate, median discretionary income, and the number of entertaining and dining establishments per 10,000 residents) were each given a weight of 100%. 
• SmartAsset then assigned each town from 0-100 depending on the towns average ranking. A 100 would be given to a town that ranked the highest in each of the five metrics, where as a zero would be given to the college town that had the lowest metric averages. 

      Results for the Best College Towns in 2015

1. Princeton, New Jersey                Princeton University 
2. Kearney, Nebraska                     University of Nebraska- Kearney 
3. Boulder, Colorado                       University of Colorado
4. Bozeman, Montana                    Montana State University
5. Cedar Falls, Iowa                       University of Northern Iowa
6. Cambridge, Massachusetts         Harvard University, MIT
7. Ann Arbor, Michigan                   University of Michigan
8. Grand Forks, North Dakota         University of North Dakota  
9. Ames, Iowa                              Iowa State University
10. Madison, Wisconsin                    University of Wisconsin 

          Results of Ames, Iowa

• Population just over 60,000
• Has the feeling of a smaller college town but actually considered a mid-size city 
• Safe streets and property crime rates among the 25 lowest college towns in this study 
• With a growing economy and an Unemployment of just 3.1%
• Growing population growth