<p>Wow. That sort of puts everything back into play because nearly all the schools on your list have strong student cultures.</p>
<p>Also, apologies to Mattmom: I didn’t mean to contradict you when I posted the google map, merely to provide a little context. 
Twenty miles outside of Charlotte isn’t far, if you’re a Davidson student. OTOH, I’m pretty familiar with North Carolina too, and you can be driving down a four lane highway well within the boundaries of a metropolitan district and not even know it; when people Down South (I know this from visiting Richmond and Durham) say, they’re going “to the city”, what they’re usually referring to is a mall.</p>
<p>As to the OP’s last question, about “balance” between student life and city-life, just about the only two places on your list that I would cross off would be Williams and Stanford. For Williams, the nearest metropolitan area would be Albany (NY) and though I’m sure it has its literary (William Kennedy’s “Ironweed”) fans, it does not loom large in the Williams consciousness.</p>
<p>And Palo-Alto is a nice place, but, no one would call it a city, or even a terribly interesting small town in its own right. Almost everyone says after visiting Stanford that it’s a city on its own which means miles of parking lots filled with nothing but student cars; it’s literally a student culture without a context.</p>