Combining city textures and college town sensibilities, Champaign really has a nice blend of characteristics. While not a huge city, Champaign is big enough to offer a healthy dose of diversion, opportunity, and amenity to its residents and to the thousands of college students who descend on it every fall. Its size and diversity makes Champaign more than just a college town, but removing the students from the equation would undeniably change Champaign’s character and quality of life.
Not only is Champaign a city with many college students, but it also retains many recent graduates who are looking to start new careers, creating a very large population of people who are young, single, educated, and upwardly-mobile. That’s because Champaign is full of single people in their 20s and 30s and who have undergraduate or graduate degrees and are starting careers in professional occupations. This makes Champaign a pretty good place for young, educated career starters looking to find many people like themselves, with good opportunities for friendships, socializing, romance, and fun.
One of the benefits of Champaign is that there is very little traffic. The average commute to work is 16.37 minutes, which is substantially less than the national average. Not only does this mean that the drive to work is less aggravating, but noise and pollution levels are lower as a result.
Champaign has a lot of people who ride the bus to and from work. In fact, for its size, Champaign has quite a high level of public transit users. Champaign’s need for inexpensive transportation options for its citizens is quite high.
If knowledge is power, Champaign is a pretty powerful place. 52.73% of the adults in Champaign have earned a 4-year college degree, masters degree, MD, law degree, or even PhD. Compare that to the national average of 21.84% for all cities and towns.
The per capita income in Champaign in 2022 was $36,223, which is middle income relative to Illinois and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $144,892 for a family of four. However, Champaign contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Champaign is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Champaign home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Champaign residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Champaign include German, Irish, English, Italian, and Polish.
In addition, Champaign has a lot of people living here who were born outside of the US (16.90%).
The most common language spoken in Champaign is English. Other important languages spoken here include Chinese and Spanish.
