Econ141 said:
Since everyone is dumping on Harvard these days, let me continue the trend.
A "college town" is one whose culture is
dominated by students and campus life. Not true in Cambridge. Rather Cambridge caters to the elites that live there, and has a few isolated bars or restaurants that suffers college students. Think of Palo Alto (the tech is a biotech scene in Cambridge). I know many Harvard grads (our wedding party was 50% HLS grads) and every one of them has opined at one time or another that they didn't have much social activity outside the school.
This is the opposite of Berkeley, where the student body and campus faculty and other staff is a much larger percentage of the city population, and dominates most areas of the city. There is a huge concentration of off campus restaurants and entertainment venues that are cost effective for students. Berkeley also started and includes an unparalleled food centric scene for the pocket books of adventurous faculty and administrators. Only in student focused Berkeley could Peet's Coffee originate and flourish! My message for those rating Harvard so high, is go west!