I think you are generally correct but need a lot more nuance in your examples. Purdue is an R1 school with around 50k students in a metro area of over 150k non

I think you are generally correct but need a lot more nuance in your examples. Purdue is an R1 school with around 50k students in a metro area of over 150k non-students. It is the largest employer in the metro, but the large factories in the area employee far more in total. It's probably a lot more like Boulder than you think. Boulder is an hour from Denver, but Lafayette is an hour from Indianapolis (a larger city than Denver) and an hour and a half from Chicago. Ohio U is an R2 school with around 30k students in a metro area of around 30k non-students. It's nowhere near any large city and doesn't have more than a small handful of other medium-sized employers. The economic effect of no students on campus for a year would look vastly different between these two cities.