Cities Skylines Campus Guide

Cities: Skylines Campus Guide

With the release of Cities Skylines Campus DLC we faced new challenges of making our education great again. This Сities Skylines Сampus guide is intended to help you in leveling up your Cities Skylines university and having no issues with education in your city.

How it Works

Just like with parks from Parklife DLC and industrial areas from Industries you will have to draw a campus area, choose one from 3 available specializations (Cities Skylines trade school, university, or liberal arts college), and meet certain requirements to level up your campus and unlock more buildings.

Leveling up depends on the number of students and academic works. Plus Cities Skylines university attractiveness is a new parameter that impacts the desire of students to choose this or that campus. We will talk later about increasing this parameter.

It is important that the City Skylines campus can level down when you stop meeting some requirements. 

Another new aspect is that from now students mean not only more educated workers in your city but also money for tuition. 

Let’s figure out how to get a cool education system in these new circumstances!

Getting Started with Your Campus

First of all, you need to choose the appropriate land for your campus. That’s not an easy task due to the fact that initially, you don’t know what would be the size of the future campus. Buildings will get unlocked as you level up your campus so you need to keep some free space next to your campus all the time till it reaches 5 stars which is a pretty long process. 

This means that the area reserved for the campus expansion will become a bottleneck in the expansion of your city. 

At the same time, prepare good public transport because no one will go to university which is hard to get to.

The first campus you unlock is the Trade school so you will have to start from it. By the way, it’s much earlier than the regular university so you will get educated citizens earlier as well.

How to Level Up: Cities Skylines Campus Attractiveness

To increase the level of your campus you will need to reach a certain value of all 3 key parameters:

• The number of students
• The number of academic works
• Certain level of Cities Skylines campus attractiveness

You start with the Unrecognized level and to reach the Recognized level you will need to meet all three requirements:

• Get 500 students
• Get 200 campus attractiveness
• Get 2 Cities Skylines academic works

That’s what I do in the beginning to set up a good campus:

1. Carefully check that I have enough area for future campus. I don’t want to spread it among different parts of the city so I have to reserve some area for future unlocked buildings
2. Make sure I have good public transport connections so that my citizens can reach the campus
3. Place all available buildings to provide the needed level of campus attractiveness
4. Waiting for the needed number of students – it depends on my population and the availability of campus
5. When the needed number of students is reached I invest in academic works. By that time it’s possible that you already have the needed number of academic works because there is a 30% base chance of creating a work every year. If I lack academic works by that time then I hire academic staff who increase the chances that academic works appear.
6. Once the campus is leveled up I place the unlocked new buildings to boost campus attractiveness Cities Skylines requires for further level ups. Some buildings such as laboratories increase chances for academic works.

Cities: Skylines Campus How to Get More Students

While you always have control over the number of academic works, the game has complex mechanics of increasing the number of students. In Cities Skylines Campus more students will appear if you follow these rules:

• Be patient. A full educational cycle from a kid to a student takes time. 9 women can’t make a baby in a month
• Provide enough schools. You citizens need access to both elementary and high schools.
• Build public libraries. That’s a new mechanic and now for proper education, you need to have good coverage with libraries.
• Organize public transport. Your residential areas should be connected with the campus
• Avoid competition. It’s always lucrative to build one more campus when it’s unlocked but the truth is it will pull some part of students in the city so you will have more work on leveling up two campus areas.

Cities Skylines How to Increase Campus Attractiveness by Introducing Varsity Sports

Another new mechanic is varsity sports. As your campus levels up you unlock sports arenas that become varsity sports stadiums when built within campus borders. When such an arena is built you start getting bonuses to your campus attractiveness when the university team wins trophies. To increase chances of winning you can hire varsity sports staff. Basically, that’s just an alternative to placing numerous campus buildings with less control.

Cities Skylines Campus Tips

• Campus areas differ not by their visuals only but by upkeep and building price and perks they provide.
• Trade school is the cheapest to build and upkeep. The Police Academy unlocked on this campus increases the Police Dept effectiveness. The School of Tourism and Travel increases tourist attractiveness and commercial income. School of Engineering increases income from industry and reduces water consumption.
• Liberal Arts campus is 25% more expensive. School of Education improves the efficiency of school education and adds school capacity. School of Environmental Studies reduces garbage accumulation. School of Economics increases income from office zones.
• University campus is 33% more expensive than Trade school. School of Law impacts the reduction of crime rate and police upkeep. School of Medicine increases the capacity of hospitals and healthcare efficiency. School of Science lets you earn more on specialized industries and at the same time makes your city consume less energy and reduce pollution.