Sorry to disagree.

"With access to six universities and twelve junior colleges in an 8 kilometer (5 mi) radius, Montreal, Quebec (Canada) has the highest proportion of post-secondary students of all major cities in North America. "

All of the examples you gave are small college towns.

'Ames' 'Ithaca' 'State College' - those are not cities etc.

Montreal has 6 major universities and other colleges crammed right downtown in a tiny radius.

San Francisco does not have 300K students in the city. There are only 800K residents in SF, that would make almost 50% students :). The 'Bay Area' - sure. But the bay is huge - and not really even a city.

Chicago is a massive, sprawling city with 600K students.

Dallas-Forth Worth - again - massive, sprawling cities, geographically spread out.

Montreal - not including the suburbs, just the city proper, has 100's of thousands of students.

I think the only other city with the student density would be Boston and the numbers may be off because Harvard and MIT are technically in Cambridge, not Boston.

What the OP stated and what I was responding to was:

>"Montreal has more students/capita than anywhere in North America, due to a clustering of big Unis downtown"

They did not state Montreal has the highest student population density areas which is what you are now saying by qualifying that with some spatial component. They said highest "per capita."

They also did not specify "city", they said "anywhere."

I think he's referring to the fact that the Uni campuses are situated directly downtown. Something rare in other American cities.

Well that would be a measure of density - more students per square meter or something. I'm not sure why that would be relevant if we're talking about the city as a whole.

Montreal has a bunch of major universities right downtown, in the city core/proper. Not the 'major metro area'.

In most other cities, they are way spread out in the region.