Austin has once again been crowned the best college town in America, topping WalletHub's 2027 rankings for a fifth consecutive year, while Plano quietly carved out a spot among Texas's notable college towns at No. 54 overall. The personal finance site evaluated 415 cities nationwide, weighing everything from tuition costs to job prospects for graduates, and Texas cities populated much of the list from top to bottom.
Austin's Long Reign Continues
Austin, TX holds the crown as the top college town of 2027, according to WalletHub, which examined 415 cities across wallet-friendliness, social environment, and academic and economic opportunities. The site graded cities using 31 separate metrics, each scored on a 100-point scale, and limited eligibility to cities with a college or university population of at least 7,500 students. It's a familiar spot for the Texas capital, which also topped the list in 2025 and 2026, per the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and CultureMap Houston, respectively.
Austin's overall win masks some middling scores in individual categories. The city ranked just 22nd nationally for quality of higher education among more than 400 cities in the study, and it placed 15th for academic and economic opportunities and 16th for social environment, according to CultureMap San Antonio. Average in-state tuition in Austin, including room and board, runs $34,651 per year, per the WalletHub report.
Plano Edges Into the Rankings
Plano landed at No. 54 overall on the 2027 list, according to CultureMap San Antonio and CultureMap Dallas's reports on the WalletHub data, placing it behind College Station but ahead of several larger Texas cities including Houston, Denton, Lubbock and Fort Worth, which ranked 37th, 73rd, 77th, 83rd and 100th respectively. The Collin County suburb's showing comes as its Collin College Plano Campus remains the only official Collin College campus with student housing in the district, according to Collin College.
Beyond housing, the Plano campus offers thriving visual and performing arts and athletics programs, the college notes, along with a library that is open to the public — amenities that round out the kind of college-town infrastructure WalletHub's study tends to reward. The campus has become something of a hub for the district even as Collin College's broader footprint spans multiple locations.
How Other Texas Cities Stacked Up
San Antonio and Houston both landed inside the top 25 among large college towns nationally, with San Antonio ranking 23rd and Houston ranking 24th in their size category, even as each placed outside the top 70 overall at No. 72 and No. 73 respectively, according to CultureMap San Antonio and CultureMap Houston. San Marcos, meanwhile, ranked second among Texas small college towns and 54th nationally in that category, landing at No. 132 overall.
Those numbers reflect a Texas college-town hierarchy that's been shifting from year to year. San Antonio ranked 21st among large college towns and 65th overall back in 2026, the same year Dallas sat at No. 43 among large U.S. college towns, per CultureMap Houston's earlier reporting. College Station, for its part, had already notched a No. 4 ranking among small cities in WalletHub's 2025 study, while Fort Worth placed 31st among large cities that same year, the Star-Telegram reported at the time.
The CultureMap Dallas report on the 2027 rankings is the latest entry in a study WalletHub has run for several years running, with Austin's streak now extending to five straight years atop the list. Whether any Dallas-area suburb can close the gap with Austin's academic and economic scores remains an open question, but for now, Plano's spot on the board gives the region another data point in the ongoing conversation about where Texas students get the most value for their money.
