<p>aerableprable, Stanford is almost 35 miles (45 minutes drive) from San Francisco. </p>
<p>Sam Lee, I totally agree. I was merely saying that major cities AREN"T and CANNOT be considered “college towns”. If fewer than 25% of the population isn’t associated to colleges, then it is not a college town. Take Madison as an example. Total population is roughly 200,000. Of those, 60,000 are either students at UW or employed by UW. Furthermore, the rest of the population in Madison are on good terms with the university. That’s a college town. Same goes for Ann Arbor, Athens, Berkeley, Boulder, Chapel Hill, Charlottesville and several other college towns. Austin and Boston are probably the only two cities with populations over 500,000 that loosely qualify as college towns.</p>
<p>Cities like Chicago, SF, NY and LA hardly qualify as college towns.</p>