Best and Worst College Towns – Why Do South Dakota’s Rank So Low?

As I scanned down the list of the Best and the Worst College Towns and Cities in America, I kept expecting to see Sioux Falls, in at least the top 50.

When I finally found Sioux Falls, it was ranked at 141st! Given that WalletHub compared 415 cities of all different sizes, that result was still surprising for a number of reasons.

These rankings are based on:

30 key indicators of academic, social and economic opportunities for students. - - WalletHub

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Those 30 indicators were broken down into 3 basic categories:

1. Wallet Friendliness
2. Social Environment
3. Academic & Economic Opportunities

Within those three categories, they grabbed a lot of information on things like:

• Cost of housing
• Number of rental units in the city
• Average price per month of a fitness club membership
• Cost of high education
• Entertainment costs (movies, bowling, etc)
• Average tuition fees
• Number of single people
• Number of cafes, breweries, food trucks, shopping centers, sports teams
• Crime rate
• Number of part-time jobs
• The median income for part-time jobs
• Job growth rate
• Unemployment rate
• Earning potential for graduates
• Entrepreneurial  activity

...and a lot more.

But, (and it's a big but!) when you compare medium-sized cities (of which Sioux Falls is one of these days) Sioux Falls places 39th out of 150 similarly-sized cities. Now that makes more sense!

The sources they gathered all this info from include, the U.S. Census Bureau, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), Transunion, TripAdvisor, and much more.

To see this complete report, see WalletHub.