Connecticut Listed as 2025’s 6th Best State for College Students
Potential college students, you may assume that Connecticut is just the sad sorority house between New York City, Boston, and Providence's big name-brand schools, but when you crunch the data? Connecticut has a few beasts of our own. We've just been named one of the best in all of the US for 2025.
According to a new study from Smilehub.org, Connecticut is 2025's 6th Best State for College Students. In order to determine the best states for college students in 2025, Smilehub.org compared the 50 states across three key dimensions - Education Quality & Support, Social Life, and Economic Environment. Those dimensions were further evaluated using 28 relevant metrics: including Graduation Rate, Student-Faculty Ratio, Retention Rate, State Funding for Higher Education, Students per Capita, Share of Single People, Nightlife Options per Capita, Environmental Health, Violent Crime Rate, Student Loan Debt per Person, Living Wage, Access to Public Transportation, Housing Costs, and Job Growth Rate.
Connecticut has the Highest State Funding for Higher Education in the US for 2025, ranked #6 in Education Quality & Support, ranked #6 in Social Life, and ranked #13 in Economic Environment. Yale University has the New Haven nightlife, along with Quinnipiac, UConn is Storrs, and their sports teams fuel Hartford and Rentschler Field, yet we still don't have a city with a population of over 150,000.
Which states were listed as being better for college students for 2025 than Connecticut? All of our neighboring states with bigger cities, an obvious choice, and 1 in middle America. California was #5, Rhode Island at #4, #3- Illinois, #2 New York, and #1- Massachusetts.
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