Of course L.A. is one of America's most expensive cities when it comes to college-area housing.

It's one of the most expensive rental cities in America, period.

Unfortunately, for young people already facing thousands of dollars each year in tuition, fees and materials costs, trying to save some cash on rent in Los Angeles isn't much of an option.

Rental listings site RadPad this afternoon released a ranking of the “50 Most Expensive Colleges in the Country to Rent Nearby Campus.”

It looked at 380 colleges and universities in the United States and, using its 54,000 listings, calculated the median two-bedroom rental price within a one-mile radius of each institution. The site says most students share apartments, so it used two-bedroom units as its basis.

Only one university, Stanford, had higher area rents than Westwood's own UCLA, which ranked second. The Palo Alto campus's area has a median rent of $5,165 for a two-bed. In UCLA's neighborhood, the median is $4,607, RadPad said.

Tuition and fees at the Westwood campus total $12,816, the university says.

Loyola Marymount University in Westchester ranked fifth with a two-bed median of $4,097. USC in University Park came in at No. 18 with a median of $3,095.

Caltech in Pasadena was 26th with a median of $2,835.

Oh, the beer you could buy.

RadPad says, on a national level, the median rent for a campus-adjacent two-bedroom apartment is just $1,357.

If cheap digs are part of your college choice criteria, it's pretty clear L.A. isn't the place for you. RadPad says college towns like Athens, Georgia (with a $700 median for a two-bedroom), Bloomington, Illinois ($610), and Ithaca, New York ($875), are the places you ought to be.

“While Stanford topped the charts with a seemingly astronomical price of $5,165 to rent a two-bedroom within a one-mile radius of campus,” a RadPad spokesman said, “the Greater L.A. area was only behind the New York/New Jersey area and Boston/Cambridge with four schools on the list. The Bay Area and Washington, D.C., also had four schools on the list.”

If you're college-bound in Southern California, you might want to think about a night job.

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