Top College Towns for Jobs

May 24, 2009— -- Brigham Young University hasn't felt much of an economic squeeze over the past year. Small businesses on the fringes of campus are making money off students, and construction continues on university buildings and dorms.

While the U.S. as a whole continues to pray for a stronger Dow Jones industrial average, a boost in the S&P 500 and a clear-cut recessionary bottom, Provo, Utah, where the university is located, has added jobs to its economy. Over the last year, there's been a 2.97 percent rise in jobs in Provo; the national unemployment rate has now hit 8.9 percent. Last year, the Milken Institute, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank, credited Provo's rise as a regional financial center, expansion of information technology services and university spending and expansions. These factors were enough to land it first on our list of best college towns for jobs.

There are also business booms in college towns like College Station, Texas (home to Texas A&M and up 2.06 percent); Baton Rouge, La. (up 2.16 percent), which Louisiana State calls home; and Durham, N.C. (up 2.49 percent), where Duke University have been major drivers of economic activity.

Click here to learn more about the top college towns for jobs at our partner site, Forbes.com.

Research universities tend to be great environments for business, as they're flush with cheap, highly talented labor (recent grads), and the massive research and development budgets universities have. Plenty of the world's top companies, including Dell, Cisco Systems and Google, began in university settings.

"Universities provide the future educated labor force and are centers of innovation, which creates an ideal ecosystem for start-ups," says Antonio Ubalde, chief executive of ZoomProspector.com, a San Francisco-based corporate relocation and start-up consulting firm. He notes that new technologies developed in many schools wind up growing into businesses of their own: "Research universities spin off academic innovations into commercial enterprises."