Colleges in LA Country

We received in the mail a while back an almanac of LA County. It had a nice breakdown of each of the cities in Los Angeles County, their populations, areas, city elected officials, and helpful numbers for citizens of those cities: trash departments, school districts, newspapers, all as needed since some cities are small.

They even list the resident colleges and universities in the respective cities. I looked over the list and jotted some notes, because it interests the nerd in me. I noticed that there was only one for-profit university on the list: DeVry. I looked it up: DeVry University is the only for-profit university that's regionally accredited. Regional accreditation is the accreditation that most traditional colleges and universities get, while national accreditation is what most for-profit universities get, a status where units won't usually transfer. I think I wrote about for-profit colleges on the other blog, but I can't locate the post.

So, back to the list.

There were a total of 50 colleges spread over 52 campuses (barring human errors during the counting committed by me).

Some interesting observations:

The city of Los Angeles does not, in fact, have the most colleges. It has the second most--five, but it probably has the most college students. The five: UCLA, CSU LA, LA City College, USC, and Loyola Marymont.

Claremont has the most universities with seven. Seven colleges in a city of less-than 25k. All seven are organized around a central area of town though, and are famous or well known in some form: Pritzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna and Pomona are the five undergrad schools, while Keck Graduate Institute and Claremont Graduate Uni cater to the graduate element.

Harvey Mudd I know of, certainly, but didn't know it was in LA (basically). It's number 2 in the country in Math and applied sciences, behind only Caltech (Pasadena), but ahead of MIT.

I found West LA College (Culver City), as well as East LA College (Monterrey Park).

There were a quartet of community colleges that used "City College" in their name: Los Angeles CC, Long Beach CC, Pasadena CC, and Santa Monica CC.

A pair chose "Community College" in the name: Glendale and Rio Hondo (located in Whittier).

There are three California State Universities: CSU LA, Long Beach State, and Cal Poly Pomona. Well, there is also a CSU Bakersfield satellite campus in Lancaster (Called CSU Bak. Antelope Valley Campus).

There's only one University of California: UCLA. This could be seen as misleading. The UC system regards itself as the top university system in the state, and has the fewest campuses. While there is only one in LA County, there are three in the area: UC Irvine, in Orange County, and UC Riverside, in Riverside County.

On the same tip, there's CSU Fullerton in Orange County.

There were even a pair of private colleges named after their respective cities: University of La Verne and Whittier College.

Strangely, there was a college with a pair of campuses that shared the name of my high school, El Camino: the main campus in Torrance supported by the secondary in Compton.

Finishing up with a college I'd never heard of in an equally foreign town: Citrus College in Glendora. Turns out it's a community college servicing the northern cities on the LA side of the mountains separating the Valley from the Basin.