City: Atlanta, GA

Category: Education

Telephone: (404) 894-2000

Address: 225 North Ave. NW

Description: Georgia Tech’s reputation extends light years beyond its 330-acre campus west of the Downtown Connector near Midtown. In a 2008 ranking, U.S. News and World Report named Tech the seventh-best public university in the nation, fourth in graduate engineering, and the top school in the nation for industrial engineering programs. During the 1996 Games, Tech was known to people around the world as the Olympic Village. Its 10,000-seat Alexander Memorial Coliseum hosted all 12 medal events in boxing. At the brand-new aquatic center, the water polo pool (seating capacity: 4,000) was the site of all aquatic events except the finals, which were held in the shaded, 15,000-seat aquatic stadium. The village’s population included about 15,000 athletes and officials. Immediately after the Olympics, Tech hosted the 1996 Paralympic Games for physically challenged athletes, using many of the same facilities the Olympics used. Tech gained seven new residence halls as a result of Olympic construction. (Oddly enough, these are not the new buildings most visibly allied to the campus; the tall dorm buildings between Tech and the Downtown Connector are occupied by Georgia State University students.) Georgia Tech was established in 1885 and has fared especially well in the past 20 years. More than 20,000 students are enrolled in six colleges: architecture, computing, engineering, sciences, management, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. The student population is 70 percent male; 90 percent of freshmen rank in the top 10 percent of their high school class.