Pittsburgh Student Contemplating Boston

[kyle19125]

Originally Posted by eschaton

I'd actually argue the reverse. Boston is a fantastic city to be a college or graduate student in - probably the best in the country. But it's less appealing as you get older due to the sheer extent to which higher education just totally dominates the city. It's possible you'll start feeling "old" by age 30 there. Plus there's of course nothing "affordable" once you decide you want to live somewhere better than a student slum.

That's kind of a ridiculous statement given the millions of people already working in the Boston metro who somehow largely manage to live in fairly nice homes/apartments with an average salary of around 72K, and the Boston MSA has an average age of 38.5 which is slightly above the national average of 37.2

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by kyle19125

That's kind of a ridiculous statement given the millions of people already working in the Boston metro who somehow largely manage to live in fairly nice homes/apartments with an average salary of around 72K, and the Boston MSA has an average age of 38.5 which is slightly above the national average of 37.2

I'm not discussing the metro at large, I'm talking about the city, which has an average age of only 30.8 years. This is lower than other major cities.

San Francisco - 38.5
NYC - 35.6
Seattle - 35.0
Los Angeles - 34.1
Washington DC - 33.8
Chicago - 33.7
Denver - 33.7
Philadelphia - 32.7
Houston - 32.3
Boston - 30.8

I'm sure if I kept looking I would find some sunbelt cities which have average ages in the 20s. But due to the extremely heavy college enrollment, Boston is one of the youngest major cities in the country.

[boulevardofdef]

Though Boston is legitimately America's biggest college town, you don't feel it everywhere. I live about an hour away, and in the past week, I've been to Boston twice for work and once for fun. I was in both Back Bay and downtown for work, and the closest college might as well have been 500 miles away. I spent Saturday in Back Bay and the South End, and it didn't really seem younger than any other major city. There were more teenagers around than identifiable college kids.