The biggest apple of all for your teacher.

February 14, 2008 1:26 PM

How many college students are there in NYC? Any good sources/cites to back the statistic up would be great too!

(FT, PT, grad/undergrad etc in the 5 boroughs)

posted by pithy comment to education (5 comments total)

According to the Census Bureau, via American FactFinder, there were 584,057 students enrolled in college or graduate school in 2006. (No direct link, just type in New York City in the "Fact Sheet" box and click "Show More" under the Social characteristics.)
posted by Eldritch at 1:46 PM on February 14

Oh, and the source is the 2006 American Community Survey. (Which is like the Decennial Census Long Form, but done continuously instead of every 10 years.)

FactFinder is the central tool for accessing U.S. Census Bureau information, including population estimates, Decennial Census data, the American Community Survey, and the Economic Census.
posted by Eldritch at 1:50 PM on February 14

According to Brookings Institute, it was almost 594K. If you click here you can get the PDF. I work in higher ed and that's the figure we've cited. As far as counting populations for the Census goes, though, college students are tricky because they're transient.
posted by cowboy_sally at 1:55 PM on February 14

College students living in NYC? Or students attending college in NYC but from other places? Or college students from NYC that might attend elsewhere or just commute outside the city.

Because there's a lot of commuter students that might live at home in say, Yonkers and go to college in Manhattan. Or live in Marine Park, Brooklyn but go to school on Long Island.
posted by waylaid at 2:00 PM on February 14

According to data available from IPEDS, as of Fall 2007, total enrollment for all institutions located in the 5 Boroughs was 449,472. To get this, I pulled a dataset from IPEDS containing enrollment for every institution of higher ed in the state of New York, collapsed it by zip code, and then merged it with the list of NYC zip codes I found here. I then summed over all NYC zip codes to get the total enrollment.

This number must be taken with a grain of salt, as it captures all students not living in NYC but attending school there and doesn't capture any students living in NYC and attending school somewhere else. If Brookings says that it is 594,000, that would probably be the number I would use. Those guys are smart.
posted by jtfowl0 at 2:26 PM on February 14