When Rebecca Mark took a job in January as director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership at Rutgers University, she and her partner, Brenda Currin, who are both in their 60s, knew they wanted to live in the college’s home of New Brunswick, N.J., rather than the suburbs.

“We were looking for a place that was biking distance to campus and walking distance to the train station,” Ms. Mark said. She and Ms. Currin, an actress, decided to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Premiere Residences, a new 23-story rental building that also houses the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.

While they had hoped to attend lots of performances, the pandemic has shut down theaters for now. Still, they enjoy other pleasures of urban life, including the downtown restaurants. “We really like the diversity of the city and the fact that there are people from all over the world,” Ms. Mark said.

With a population of about 56,000 in 5.2 square miles, this Middlesex County city on the banks of the Raritan River is best known as the home of Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, founded more than 250 years ago. The school’s footprint is everywhere, from the College Avenue campus to the Cook and Douglass campuses across town, and in buildings scattered around New Brunswick. (Rutgers has two more campuses, Livingston and Busch, in nearby Piscataway, as well as outposts in Newark and Camden.)