The University of Minnesota may sit in the second largest Big Ten city, but its students pay the fourth least amount for on-campus room and board, according to statistics gathered by StateUniversity.com. Not all price tags correspond directly to the citiesâÄô populations. The website compiles statistics on campus housing costs along with other categories, like tuition cost, student retention and an all-U.S. ranking, determined by a schoolâÄôs ACT and SAT scores, its student retention, faculty salary, and student to faculty ratio, according to the website. Prices of on-campus and off-campus housing have a lot to do with âÄúincome tenant populationâÄù âÄî how rich people are in a certain area. If homes surrounding the school cost more, then the landowners have the ability to charge higher prices to rent, Esther Patt, the coordinator of the Tenant Union program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said. A few common characteristics of the Big Ten schools is that every university except the University of Iowa [212] ranks in the websiteâÄôs top 200 U.S. universities, and all but Purdue University have increased the cost of on-campus housing over the last three years. Because the universities are charging more for students to rent on campus, off-campus prices are rising as well, Patt said. In Champaign-Urbana, what the âÄúuniversity charges for the residence halls sets a base expectationâÄù for the landowners in the area, and since the price of housing at the University of Illinois is going up, so is the price around campus. Patt stressed the âÄúbase expectationâÄù effect happens in smaller cities where the students make up a large amount of the tenant population, but the effects arenâÄôt as strong in larger cities like the Twin Cities or ChicagoâÄìEvanston.