Abstract: Compared with the university evaluation rankings issued by professional organizations, the ranking of colleges and universities in the mind of the public often has a more direct impact on college enrollment, scientific research, and social collaboration. In this paper, adopting the questionnaire survey method, we take college students as the representative social group to dig out the difference between the public evaluation ranking of universities and the actual ranking of universities, analyze the correlation between this difference and the economic and demographic indicators of the city where an university is located. And then, we reconstruct the public evaluation ranking of universities and analyze the correlation between the rank change and the economic and demographic indicators of cities to quantitatively measure the influence of city indicators on the public evaluation rankings of universities. We find that the public evaluation ranking of universities which are located in the city with high urbanization level and developed tertiary industry usually are higher than their actual rankings, which shows the remarkable influence of regional economy and city population on the public evaluation of universities.