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Building on Part 1 of this series, our analysis of campus commerce uncovers which businesses thrive in the collegiate ecosystem, from the predictable dominance of fast food chains to the surprising revenue power of campus laundromats and grocery stores. Digging into transaction data from thousands of campus businesses reveals a sharp economic divide between elite institutions and the rest of the pack, with purchases totaling nearly 11 times more at campus businesses on private university campuses than their public school counterparts. In this installment, we focus on the institutions and industries that stand at the extreme edges of our campus spending data.
Stanford University tops the total spending ranks with $937M in annual credit card purchases at businesses based on their 8,180-acre campus (the largest in the United States and second largest in the world). The sheer scale of their campus economy towers over most other college towns: Stanford businesses average $78.38 per transaction—more than double the national campus average of $37.75. Dartmouth College, another geographically isolated campus, also shows consistently elevated transaction prices averaging $57.01. These remote academic institutions effectively operate as economic islands where limited competition allows campus businesses to corner a captive audience of students and staff.
The UCLA campus leads annual parking revenue with $14.63M, amounting to an average of $2.44M per parking lot across their six facilities in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. UCLA’s main "Parking and Information Kiosk" alone processes 910,851 transactions annually (2,495 per day). This massive volume reflects the car-dependent culture of Los Angeles, where public transit options remain limited compared to other major cities. Among all universities, UCLA's parking revenue is 15 times the national average ($0.97M). The parking operation generates more annual transactions than most campuses see across all businesses combined, with an average transaction of just $16 suggesting heavy reliance on hourly and daily passes rather than semester permits.
Pizzerias on the Fordham University campus lead the nation with an average of 23 credit card transactions per student each year. Including cash purchases of pizza slices around their main campus in the Bronx could easily double this figure. Across the top ten schools for pizza orders nationwide (that is, the biggest pizza spenders), other campus pizza joints average just 13.9 orders per student — nearly half the number at Fordham. Delivery orders from off-campus pizzerias would certainly push this figure even higher. As pizza-loving New Yorkers, Enigma salutes you, Fordham University.
Another leader in sheer volume of fast food spending, the UCLA community spent $6.3M on pizza and $9M on burgers last year— and 95% of the burger sales were just at In-N-Out. California also leads the nation in total pizza spending with over $36M statewide. Yet despite the stereotype of college life fueled by late-night pizza deliveries, even this massive figure represents just a fraction of total food spending on the UCLA campus. The highest-earning grocery store on any college campus last year was UCLA’s Whole Foods, whose revenues were nearly $35M according to our data on card transactions.
Campus grocery stores, in general, became absolute goldmines during the Covid pandemic and remain highly lucrative even today. Analyzing 94 grocery stores across 65 different campuses reveals average revenues of $3.9M per location. Alongside UCLA, the Dartmouth grocery store stands as a massive outlier, generating $27.4M annually—likely benefiting from a rural New Hampshire setting where it serves as the primary food source for thousands of students. Likewise, given that many customers at the UCLA Whole Foods may have no connection to the university, the Dartmouth grocery store stands as an especially remarkable case.
Overall, the top 10% of campus restaurants generate 46% of food revenue, demonstrating that student dining follows a power law distribution where a handful of popular establishments dominate. National fast food chains represent the apex of this ecosystem, with individual Chick-fil-A locations sometimes earning over $8M in annual revenue while comprising a full 25% of total campus dining cashflow. In a surprising twist, pizzerias earn just 4.1% of total campus dining revenue nationwide — a surprisingly low figure that also challenges stereotypes about pizza-fueled college life.
On the other hand, caffeine dependence is a college stereotype that holds up: Coffee shops near campus libraries see 150% revenue increases during finals, with transaction volume data confirming that the end-of-term crunch is inevitably a caffeine-fueled enterprise. These strategic locations capitalize on proximity to study spaces, turning academic stress into revenue spikes.
Laundromats stand out in our dataset as reliable cash cows, with campus laundry businesses averaging $1.2M annually and often outperforming restaurants in per-student revenue. While these campus laundromats generate only $2.76 per student annually, they do so with minimal labor costs, no inventory beyond detergent, and self-service operations that run 24/7. The captive market and essential nature of laundry create a recession-proof business model that thrives regardless of broader economic conditions.
Likewise, despite the industry-wide decline of campus bookstores (see the first installment of this series), several flagship institutions defy the trend through strategic pivots to branded merchandise. Ohio State leads nationally with $7.63M in campus bookstore revenue, while the University of Washington ($7.47M) and University of Virginia ($7.02M) round out the top three—all generating 29x the industry median of $0.26M. For these businesses to thrive as their peers decline suggests that branded merchandise, not textbooks, now drives revenue at successful campus bookstores. The data bears this out: thriving university bookstores show average transactions of $35-73—squarely in the merchandise range—rather than the $200-500 typical of textbook-heavy stores. Only 2 of 47 major bookstores still focus primarily on textbooks, with the "merchandise-heavy" category (transactions under $50) generating $91.4M collectively versus just $3.3M for textbook-level transactions.
Our data also reveals a dramatic economic chasm in spending money between student populations: Elite private schools average $11,456 in on-campus spending per student, while public universities average just $1,047. This depicts fundamental disparities in student wealth, with elite school students spending more on coffee and convenience items than many public school students spend on textbooks. The gap is especially stark at the extremes: the bottom quartile of public university campuses see an average of just $413 in spending per student each year.
On that note, let’s talk a bit about where our data comes from, how we did this work, and what we mean by “on-campus.”
Enigma profiles every business in the US, breaking out its individual operating locations, then assembling monthly aggregate data on their payment card transaction revenue (credit, debit, EBT, FSA, HSA). Sadly for our campus spending analysis, we don’t yet have visibility into “campus cash” or “dining bucks.”
In order to analyze on-campus spending patterns, we needed a way to figure out which businesses we should count as being on a college or university campus. So first, we needed campus maps. The US Department of Homeland Security used to publish a dataset with the geographic boundaries of colleges and universities, but public access to this platform was disabled on August 26th, 2025. The Excel file with new location data was only online for an additional two weeks, and even then many of the datasets didn’t make it to their new intended storage locations (note to hungry journalists). Luckily, you can still grab a copy of the 2024 campus data from here.
But back to how we used this campus geodata. Sometimes the DHS dataset treats a campus as a large enclosed area encompassing every university building. Other times, the campus maps will outline many individual buildings constituting an urban campus like NYU, where university buildings are interspersed throughout a dense urban environment like Greenwich Village. A ‘campus’ on this map could even be a single building, like a small professional school that rents out commercial real estate.
[Map screenshots]
To figure out which businesses we should count as “on-campus,” we matched our geographic dataset of campus boundaries with a “spatial index” called H3 to connect these boundaries with all the businesses in Enigma’s database through a geographic lattice of hexagons and pentagons. This allowed us to filter for businesses located on campus cells — effectively no more than 132 meters away from the campus boundaries at their furthest (for the nerds: h3 zoom 10). This way we would see everything that’s clearly within the campus, as well as the convenience stores across the street, but not the bar a quarter mile (~400 m) away. Granted, this system will also pick up false positives — say, a high-end, rotating sushi bar across the street from a for-profit university renting a room in an office tower. As a serviceable means of cutting out this noise and focusing on "traditional" 4-year residential campuses with meaningful on-campus economies, we filtered our dataset to have a 10K minimum enrollment and minimum campus revenue of $10M for urban universities, reducing our initial dataset from about 90K to 14K businesses.
As noted, the greatest limitation of this analysis is that our payment card data necessarily excludes the private, internal transaction systems used on campus. Many colleges and universities issue “campus cash” or “dining bucks” that deduct from student commissary accounts. While our analysis draws on data for campus spending that happens through credit cards, the true stories of “campus bucks” shall remain hidden in the vast catacombs of academic secrecy.
For one day only, this site let you track where the parking cops were in SF. Sadly it was too beautiful to live, but its one-day leaderboard still lives on. [Wired]