Study Abroad in Venezuela!, Worst College Towns, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of Dec. 30 - Jan. 5.
Note: Around the College Towns is my weekly-ish links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.
The International Education of Venezuela
Over the weekend, the US started a conflict in Venezuela. I am sure you can find a lot of foreign policy discussions elsewhere, but it got me thinking about the international education components between the two countries. Education policy always takes a back seat to foreign policy, so it is no surprise that this space has not gone swimmingly in recent years.
Just last year, US President Donald Trump suspended visa processing for students from Venezuela (F, M, or J), with only very limited exceptions. Even before this proclamation, visas to the US were not easy to come by for Venezuelans. For instance, a Little League team was rejected from playing in the Little League World Series.
In 2016, there was a peak of 8,540 Venezuelan international students in the US, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE). That number kept sliding each year until this last year, where there were just 3,886. Presumably, there will be even fewer Venezuelan students in the next academic year, as even the refugee and asylum pathways have been closed.
What was even more surprising to me is that despite the tenuous diplomatic relations between the countries, there were some American students who still studied abroad in Venezuela. Of course, the number is very very small though. The peak was way back in 2000 with 206 students, according to IIE’s Project Atlas, mostly sliding over the years to just a handful. Still, in the 2023 academic year, 13 American students went there to study abroad! I am so curious about who they were and what they were doing.
My mind went straight to this classic, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (1987), by Robin W. Winks. International education has certainly been used by various intelligence agencies around the world (I have written about that, too). But there are other reasons beyond espionage for someone to want to study abroad there. I laud the brave adventurers who called Venezuela their home for a semester. We actually need more people like them (I’ll have a future article related to this).
In terms of programs, there are basically no American branch campuses nor study abroad centers in Venezuela. These kinds of international education programs have all disappeared. James Madison University used to have the El Sistema: The National Youth Symphony and Choir Program of Venezuela, which allowed students to study music in Caracas and Mérida. The University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin had a partnership with VENUSA College of International Studies and Modern Languages. I cannot find when it officially closed. Tulane even had some kind of joint grad programs with IESA in Caracas. It looks like the MBA was moved to Guatemala.
It remains to be seen what will happen after the US strikes and military excursions in the country. My guess is that academic and educational relations will be even more strained in the coming years. Not much of a limb, I know. The situation is a good example of how foreign policy always trumps educational endeavors.
Links I’m Reading This Week
Education
University of Akron is outsourcing management of its dorms for the next 50 years. My biggest fear with these kinds of deals is that service quality gets much worse and students get squeezed by the for-profit managers. Though in this case, some of the refurbishments will be done by a nonprofit.
Native American groups are concerned about proposed dorms in Charleston. I’m normally skeptical of such claims, but graves from these groups are more relevant than Boomers calling students pollution.
California State University-Channel Islands campus was used for filming the new season of Fallout. It is actually a solid show, too, especially for a video game adaptation. Pretty cool! I may have to do a future article on colleges as film and TV shooting locations.
“Scary Dairy” is an annexed part of the Cal-State Channel Island campus. Duke University released Public Domain Day! Notable is Betty Boop. No, I’m not going to do a series on the character like I did last year with Tintin. Sort of disappointing what we got in the public domain this year actually.
Top 500 rare books, maps, and other paper collectibles auctioned off in 2025. It makes me chuckle how #4 is the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, but #2 is some autographed cards from Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. Fun list to peruse.
Another change coming this year here in California is limits to phones in schools. This is the very near future for pretty much all schools, which I agree with. I guess the question for us educators is when does this make its way to higher ed?
Urbanism-ish
A billionaire wants to build a new utopian city in Appalachia. Connects to the very real strain of utopianism in American culture, but I’d rather see someone like that fix what we have.
Dallas downtown isn’t booming like the rest of the city. If you look at the space, it is a lot of dead space, modernism, and company HQs. This is basically Le Corbusier’s vision of a city, and it just doesn’t work well for the human senses. We need livable downtowns.
Look at the cover photo. This is the kind of place people come to work and then leave. No one wants to hang out here. Waymo looks for big expansion in 2026. Did your city make the list? When I was back in OKC during the holiday, people there still didn’t seem to believe the technology existed.
A large number of Americans would like to live car-lite or even car-free. These kinds of places are so expensive because we do not let the market give us more, so walkable spaces are artificially inflated. Build more!
Top ridership growth from the previous year is pretty interesting. What sticks out for you? For me, it’s how well Vegas has been doing despite pretty much every leadership decision there geared towards cars. M. Nolan Gray has a good article on his Substack.
Closing Time… Worst College Towns Ranking
I am a fan of the CityNerd YouTube channel, aka Ray Delahanty. He covers a broad range of topics related to urbanism, which I have linked to before. This week, he crossed streams over into my territory with a ranking of Awful College Towns in the US. Welcome to the Worst Four Years of Your Life is the video tagline.
His ranking took the 136 schools that make up the FBS football Division I (e.g., the highest level of college football). He then used Walk Score, Bike Score, and National Transit Database to calculate a ranking (there are a couple of other steps that you can watch in the video).
Given that I have long critiqued rankings, I must say that he commits at least one of my sins. He also missed all the small liberal arts colleges. But I do think that CityNerd is not trying to create some impactful metric like US News, and instead is just giving the world some insightful commentary. So his sins will be forgiven by me as granted by the powers in my Papal Ranking of World Universities.
Here is the CityNerd final ranking of Awful College Towns:
Troy University.
Jacksonville State
Arkansas State
Kennesaw State
Liberty University
Sam Houston State
Western Kentucky University
Coastal Carolina University
Middle Tennessee State
Louisiana Tech
I must say, I pretty much agree that most of these places are not the ideal college town. The only thing I may correct him on in the video is that Liberty comprises mostly of online students, so they are not living near that campus like with the others.
Additionally, I did spend a little bit of time at Louisiana Tech, the only one on the list, during my very first job out of undergrad as a leadership consultant for my fraternity (great job for a 23-year-old, by the way [perhaps a future post]). I actually did not hate Ruston! There are some neighborhoods around campus that have a more college town-vibe, with a tiny walkable strip. There are some cool bars in that area, and I had one of the best crawfish boils of my life there. I don’t actually think it would be the worst place to spend four years.
Nonetheless, the video/ ranking is pretty fun. Perhaps I will have to do my own version one day. You can watch the full video below. What do you think of the ranking? What is the worst college town that you have ever been to?
That is a great channel, wish it was in podcast form.