Photo: Wikipedia
Demographics of College Park, MD
Affluence Level in College Park, MD
A below-average socioeconomic profile. Incomes, home values, and educational attainment trail the U.S., with higher poverty and unemployment.
People of College Park, MD
The people of College Park, Maryland, form a dense, highly educated, and racially diverse community of 34,397 residents, shaped overwhelmingly by the presence of the University of Maryland. Nearly half of all adults hold a college degree, and the city’s foreign-born population stands at 14.0%, creating a distinctly international and transient character. Unlike a traditional bedroom suburb, College Park is a university town with a permanent core of families and professionals layered over a constantly rotating student body, giving it a youthful, politically moderate-to-liberal identity that contrasts with much of surrounding Prince George’s County.
How the city was settled and grew
College Park’s human history begins not with colonial settlement but with a deliberate act of institution-building. The city was founded in 1856 as a stop on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, but its real origin story starts in 1856 when the Maryland Agricultural College (now the University of Maryland) was chartered on a former slave plantation called Rossborough. The original population was a mix of faculty, railroad workers, and farmers. The historic Old Town neighborhood, centered around the railroad depot and Route 1, housed the earliest non-student residents—mostly white, native-born families who worked for the college or the railroad. A second wave arrived after World War II, when the GI Bill flooded the university with students and the federal government expanded nearby agencies like the FDA and NASA. This era saw the construction of the Berwyn neighborhood, a post-war subdivision of single-family homes that attracted white middle-class families, many of them veterans and their young children. The city’s population grew from roughly 3,000 in 1940 to over 18,000 by 1960, almost entirely white and native-born.
Modern era (post-1965)
The 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act and the end of restrictive housing covenants transformed College Park’s demographics. Black families, who had been largely confined to the segregated Lakeland neighborhood—a historically Black community founded in the 1890s by freedmen and later surrounded by the expanding university—began moving into previously all-white areas like Berwyn and College Park Woods during the 1970s and 1980s. By 1990, the city was roughly 45% white and 35% Black. The post-1965 immigration wave also brought the first significant foreign-born populations. East and Southeast Asian families—primarily Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese—settled in the Calvert Hills and Daniels Park neighborhoods, drawn by proximity to the university and affordable housing near the College Park Metro station (opened 1993). Indian subcontinent families, a separate and growing group, concentrated in the same areas, particularly around the university’s engineering and computer science departments. Hispanic residents, now 17.3% of the population, began arriving in the 1990s and 2000s, settling in the Hollywood neighborhood and along the US 1 corridor, often working in construction, landscaping, and the service industry. Today, the city’s racial breakdown is 38.7% white, 23.8% Black, 17.3% Hispanic, 8.2% East/Southeast Asian, and 7.2% Indian—a mosaic that reflects both the university’s global draw and the county’s broader diversity.
The future
The population of College Park is trending toward greater diversity, but the city is also becoming more stratified by income and education. The university’s expansion—including the 2018 opening of the Discovery District, a 150-acre innovation hub—is attracting a new wave of highly educated, often foreign-born professionals, particularly in tech and biotech. This is reinforcing the concentration of East/Southeast Asian and Indian residents in neighborhoods near campus, while Black and Hispanic populations are growing more slowly or plateauing. The city’s foreign-born share (14.0%) is likely to rise as the Discovery District matures, but the transient student population (roughly 30,000 undergraduates) will continue to suppress the median age and keep the city’s character youthful and fluid. The biggest demographic question is whether the historic Black community, which has seen its share decline from 35% in 1990 to 23.8% today, will stabilize or continue to shrink as rising housing costs push families to more affordable parts of Prince George’s County. Meanwhile, the Hispanic population is growing steadily but remains concentrated in lower-cost areas, suggesting a potential for future geographic expansion.
For someone moving in now, College Park is becoming a more globally connected, professionally oriented university town, but one where the old neighborhood boundaries still matter. The city is not homogenizing; it is tribalizing into distinct enclaves defined by income, education, and ethnicity. A new resident should expect a place that is intellectually vibrant, racially complex, and increasingly expensive—a small city that feels more like a dense, international college district than a traditional American suburb.
* Values derived from national, state, county, city and local statistics and may differ in a specific area. Last updated: 2026-04-22T03:18:32.000Z
Narrative content on this page is AI-generated and may contain mistakes. Verify any details that matter before acting on them.
ReloMaps may earn a commission from affiliate links at no extra cost to you.
