All of Boston's Universities are located downtown or in Cambridge; no slums at Kenmore/Brookline/Downtown, but go out to the outskirts of the city, like Mission Hills, Roxbury or Dorchester (away from Huntington Ave. Medical Campus). Or the part of Brighton and lower Allston that's further away from Harvard and BU. Or the true Slumerville of Somerville away from Tufts. Even East Cambridge away from MIT and Kendall Sq., although that part of town is fast gentrifying a la Davis Sq.

The misconception is that Boston is this global city of about 4.5 million people living in academic utopia when it's a really smaller city of 600,000 people, where even a smaller percentage are actually living in ivory towers. The rest of the 4.5 million people live in typical post-industrial New England towns surrounding Boston such as Lynn, Revere and Quincy.