Combining city textures and college town sensibilities, Columbia really has a nice blend of characteristics. While not a huge city, Columbia is big enough to offer a healthy dose of diversion, opportunity, and amenity to its residents and to the thousands of college students who descend on it every fall. Its size and diversity makes Columbia more than just a college town, but removing the students from the equation would undeniably change Columbia’s character and quality of life.

Not only is Columbia a city with many college students, but it also retains many recent graduates who are looking to start new careers, creating a decent-sized population of people who are young, single, educated, and upwardly-mobile. This makes it a good choice for other relocating single professionals. Here, these young singles will find many others like themselves, with opportunities for friendships, socializing, romance, and fun.

One of the benefits of Columbia is that there is very little traffic. The average commute to work is 18.51 minutes, which is substantially less than the national average. Not only does this mean that the drive to work is less aggravating, but noise and pollution levels are lower as a result.

The education level of Columbia ranks among the highest in the nation. Of the 25-and-older adult population in Columbia, 43.38% have at least a bachelor's degree. The typical US community has just 21.84% of its adults holding a bachelor's degree or graduate degree.

The per capita income in Columbia in 2018 was $30,863, which is upper middle income relative to South Carolina and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $123,452 for a family of four. However, Columbia contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.

Columbia is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Columbia home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Columbia residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Columbia include German, English, Irish, African, and Italian.

The most common language spoken in Columbia is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Chinese.