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Muncie named as most affordable US college town

By Stephanie Wiechmann | Published on in Uncategorized

Muncie has topped a list naming the country’s most affordable college town. The website realtor.com annually ranks the most and least expensive college towns in the US by a metric realtors know well – median home prices.

Muncie’s median home price is listed as just under $78,000. The housing prices in the city that houses Ball State University and a campus of Ivy Tech Community College were about $4,000 less than the second city on the list – Charleston, Illinois. And it’s much lower than the survey’s most expensive college town. Berkley, California, like Muncie, boasts two colleges, but with a median home price of about $850,000.

 

Here are the full “least expensive” and “most expensive” lists: (provided by realtor.com)

2015 – Least Expensive College Town Rankings

  1.  Muncie, IN  $ 77,900    Ball State University, Ivy Tech Community College
  2. Charleston, IL  $ 81,500    Eastern Illinois University
  3. Macomb, IL    $100,900    Western Illinois University
  4. Kirksville, MO    $109,900    Truman State University
  5. Big Rapids, MI    $114,000    Ferris State University
  6. Kalamazoo, MI    $117,900    Western Michigan University
  7. Cortland, NY    $120,950    State University of New York at Cortland
  8. Carbondale, IL    $128,500    Southern Illinois University
  9. Carrollton, GA    $133,200    University of West Georgia
  10. Urbana-Champaign, IL  $140,000   University of Illinois

2015 – Most Expensive College Town Rankings

  1. Berkeley, CA    $849,000    University of California – Berkeley, Berkeley City College
  2. Santa Cruz, CA    $814,000    University of California – Santa Cruz
  3. Boulder, CO    $789,000    University of Colorado – Boulder
  4. San Luis Obispo, CA  $690,000      California Polytechnic State University
  5. Cambridge, MA     $685,000 Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  6. Claremont, CA    $675,000    Claremont University Consortium
  7. Princeton, NJ    $650,000    Princeton University
  8. Davis, CA    $579,000    University of California – Davis
  9. Chapel Hill, CA    $450,000    University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Duke University
  10. Flagstaff, AZ $431,750      Northern Arizona University