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Demographics of Ames, IA
Affluence Level in Ames, IA
A middle-class area roughly in line with national averages across income, home values, education, and employment.
People of Ames, IA
The people of Ames, Iowa, today form a highly educated, predominantly white population of 66,112, shaped decisively by Iowa State University’s gravitational pull. With 63.5% holding a college degree—nearly triple the national average—the city’s character is youthful, transient, and academically driven, yet anchored by a stable core of long-term residents in established neighborhoods. The foreign-born share stands at 7.1%, with distinct East/Southeast Asian (7.2%) and Indian-subcontinent (2.2%) communities that have grown alongside the university’s research and engineering programs. This is a city where a globally recruited faculty and student body coexist with families whose roots trace back to the original agricultural settlers, creating a demographic tension between academic flux and Midwestern continuity.
How the city was settled and grew
Ames was founded in 1864 as a railroad town on the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad, named after Congressman Oakes Ames. The decisive event was the 1858 selection of Ames as the site for the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm (now Iowa State University), which opened in 1869. The original population was overwhelmingly native-born white settlers of Northern European descent—German, Scandinavian, and British stock—drawn by land grants and the promise of agricultural education. The first residential neighborhoods clustered around the railroad depot and the college campus: Old Town, the original plat south of the tracks, housed railroad workers and tradesmen, while College Creek and the area near the original campus farm buildings became home to faculty and early students. A second wave came with the Morrill Act’s land-grant expansion in the 1890s, bringing more farm families who sent their children to the college and settled in the North Ames district, which grew along the streetcar line. By 1900, the population had reached 2,422, almost entirely white and native-born, with a small number of African American families working as domestic servants or railroad laborers, concentrated in a few blocks near the depot in what was then called the “South Side” area.
Modern era (post-1965)
The 1965 Hart-Celler Act opened immigration from Asia and the Indian subcontinent, and Ames’s population began to diversify in step with Iowa State’s rise as a research powerhouse. The university aggressively recruited graduate students and faculty in engineering, agriculture, and the sciences from East Asia (China, South Korea, Taiwan) and India, creating the city’s first sizable non-white populations. These newcomers settled in rental-heavy neighborhoods near campus: Westgate and University Village became hubs for East/Southeast Asian graduate students and their families, while Indian-subcontinent professionals and faculty gravitated toward the Stuart Smith and Edwards neighborhoods on the west side, where newer single-family homes offered stability. Domestic in-migration during this period was dominated by white professionals and academics from other Midwestern states, who filled the expanding subdivisions of Northridge and South Duff Avenue. The Hispanic population grew more slowly, reaching 4.9% by 2020, with families settling in the Campustown rental corridor and the East Ames industrial area, often working in construction, food service, and the university’s maintenance staff. The Black population, at 3.6%, remains small and is concentrated among university employees and graduate students, with no single dominant neighborhood. The white share has declined from over 90% in 1980 to 77.6% today, but the city remains less diverse than the national average, with racial groups living in distinct, often university-adjacent enclaves rather than fully integrated blocks.
The future
The population trajectory points toward continued, gradual diversification driven by Iowa State’s global recruitment, but the city is not homogenizing. East/Southeast Asian and Indian-subcontinent communities are growing steadily, with the Asian share rising from roughly 4% in 2000 to 7.2% today, and the Indian share from under 1% to 2.2%. These groups are increasingly settling in the West Ames subdivisions near the new ISU Research Park, where tech and biotech jobs anchor families. The Hispanic population is growing more slowly, plateauing around 5%, while the Black share has been flat for a decade. The white population, while still the majority, is aging and being replenished by younger, transient students and faculty who often leave after graduation or retirement. The next 10-20 years will likely see the foreign-born share rise toward 10-12%, with East/Southeast Asian and Indian communities becoming more visible in local politics and business, but the city’s fundamental character—a university town with a highly educated, liberal-leaning core and a conservative-leaning periphery of long-term residents—will persist. The neighborhoods are likely to remain tribalized by income and ethnicity: Campustown and Westgate will stay young and diverse, while Northridge and Edwards will remain predominantly white and professional.
For someone moving in now, Ames is a city where the university is the dominant demographic force, creating a population that is both transient and stable, diverse and segregated by neighborhood. The high education level and global recruitment mean a welcoming environment for professionals and academics, but the city’s small size and Midwestern roots mean that long-term residents—especially in the older, white-majority neighborhoods—still set the cultural tone. It is a place becoming more diverse, but slowly, and largely through the university pipeline rather than broad immigration.
* Values derived from national, state, county, city and local statistics and may differ in a specific area. Last updated: 2026-04-30T06:11:12.000Z
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