Tampa is ranks above Miami and Gainesville, but below Orlando in a new study of the best college towns and cities in America.
That’s according to WalletHub, which compared more than 400 U.S. cities of varying size across 30 indicators of academic, social and economic opportunities for students (ie: cost of living and pizza, quality of higher education, number of single people, crime rate and more).
Tampa’s official rank is No. 7, but the city ranked pretty low when it came to WalletHub’s “Wallet Friendliness” metric, where it came in at No. 165. Overall, Orlando came in at No. 2 (and ranks first in “Social Environment”) while Miami (No. 16) and Gainesville (No. 18) came in below.
When ranked by city size, Tampa — a large city with more than 300,00 people, according to the study — came in at No. 2 behind Austin, Texas. St. Petersburg actually came in at No. 66 on the midsize city scale (125,000-300,000 people).
In case you were wondering, a full-time student (12 credit hours or more) can expect to pay $14,604 per semester at the University of Tampa (a private university) while a Florida resident enrolled full-time at the Tampa campus of University of South Florida (a public university) can expect to play $2,534.
See the full study via wallethub.com, and check out the map below.
This article appears in Dec 6-13, 2018.