Best College Towns

We love lists. We loved them long before Buzzfeed ruined them. Today let's look at one of my favorite sets of lists, rankings of the best college town. These lists use wildly varying methodologies -- assuming there's any methodology at all -- hence you find wildly varying results.

I grabbed four lists. Sorry about the crappy formatting.

RANK	BestCollegeReviews	livability.com	Niche	USAToday
1	Boulder, CO	Ames, IA	Santa Barbara, CA	Ithica, NY
2	Ann Arbor, MI	Logan, UT	State College, PA	State College, PA
3	Madison, WI	Oxford, OH	San Luis Obispo, CA	Iowa City, IA
4	Ithica, NY	Fayetteville, AR	Durango, CO	Ames, IA
5	Ames, IA	Tempe, AZ	Chapel Hill, NC	Champaign-Urbana, IL

As you can see, not a lot of agreement. Ithica NY does well. And the lists love Iowa. Athens, Ga., where I teach, doesn't score well on these lists (39th on one, 41st on another, not mentioned in others). Oddly, lists often put it as the #1 or #2 college town in America, but as you can see not everyone agrees with this assessment. In general, southern schools don't do well, with the exception being Chapel Hill and, weird, Fayetteville, Arkansas. Really?