West Lafayette, by the numbers: the town inside the college town

West Lafayette is a city of about 45,000 people. Roughly half of them are Purdue students. Every statistic published about the town is an average of those two populations, and most of the people who quote those statistics never separate them. This note does.

The Census counts people where they live most of the year, so a student in a residence hall or an apartment near campus is a West Lafayette resident. In the 2020 Census, 49.4 percent of the city was between 18 and 24 years old. That is the student half.

The other half, the permanent community, is in the low-to-mid 20,000s: faculty, physicians, engineers, researchers, and families who have been here for decades. It is the community you actually join when you buy a home here, and on its own it is the size of Seymour or Shelbyville. The difference is what it is made of.

Among West Lafayette adults 25 and older, 73.3 percent hold a bachelor's degree or higher. Nationally the figure is about 36 percent. In Indiana cities of comparable size it runs from 15 to 28 percent.

Bachelor's degree or higher, adults 25+, and median value of owner-occupied homes. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates.

The second column follows from the first. The median owner-occupied home in West Lafayette is valued at $350,000, roughly double the median in Indiana towns of the same size, and closer to Carmel than to anything else in Tippecanoe County. Education is not the whole explanation, but it is most of it: a permanent population that is three quarters degree-holding buys, maintains and holds property differently, and the market prices that in.

One number will look wrong. West Lafayette's median household income is $34,891, below every comparable town. That is the student half again. Seventy percent of the city's households are renters, a large share of them students reporting little or no income, and a city-wide median cannot tell the two apart. The owner-occupied neighborhoods are described far better by the home-value and education figures above than by a median that averages a physician's household with a sophomore's.

Purdue's West Lafayette campus enrolls about 55,000 students, and by the Institute of International Education's Open Doors count it has the fourth-largest international enrollment of any public university in the country, more than 12,000 students from about 130 countries. The city shows it: 20.5 percent of residents were born outside the United States, and 24.2 percent speak a language other than English at home. Those are figures you would expect in a coastal metro, not a city of 45,000 in the Indiana corn belt, and they change what daily life feels like here. The restaurants, the calendar of lectures and performances, the Big Ten weekends, and the simple fact that a research university of this scale never stops: this is the energy a world-class campus provides, and it is available to a family living on a quiet street ten minutes from it.

West Lafayette Community School Corporation is a small district, and it is a nationally ranked one. In the 2026 to 2027 U.S. News rankings, West Lafayette Jr./Sr. High School is second in Indiana and 170th of all public high schools in the United States. For a relocating family, a top-200 public high school inside city limits is a rarer thing than it sounds.

College towns are sometimes assumed to be one-employer economies. Greater Lafayette is not. Purdue and the Purdue Research Foundation anchor the west side, and the Research Park is home to more than 250 companies. Across the river, Subaru of Indiana Automotive employs more than 6,500 people at the only Subaru plant outside Japan, and Caterpillar's Large Engine Center employs about 1,900 and is in the middle of a $725 million expansion. Cook Biotech, the biomaterials company that grew up in the Research Park, employs about 275. Health care adds two regional hospital systems. That is a diversified base, and it is the reason the owner-occupied market here has behaved like a stable professional city rather than a campus that empties every May.

There is more coming, and it is large enough to deserve its own note. But the case for West Lafayette does not depend on it. The case is already in the numbers above: the most educated community of its size in the state, with home values to match, a nationally ranked school district, and a campus that keeps a small city connected to the world. The next note is about what happens when a second anchor employer arrives in a town that already looks like this.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts and American Community Survey 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates for West Lafayette, Franklin, Shelbyville, Seymour and Crawfordsville; 2020 Census age profile for West Lafayette; U.S. Census Bureau national educational attainment, 2024; U.S. News Best High Schools 2026 to 2027; Purdue University enrollment reporting, fall 2025; Open Doors Report 2024, Institute of International Education; Purdue Research Park company directory; Subaru of Indiana Automotive; Caterpillar Lafayette expansion announcement, 2024; Cook Group sale announcement. All read at source, September 2026.