There are certainly hundreds, possibly thousands.
Colleges have a strange history in the U.S. European countries tended to have just a few colleges for the upper classes in major cities (or in satellite cities like Oxford and Cambridge). American colleges reflected the nature of the country as a whole. From the beginning, they strove to be meritocracies. They certainly catered to the upper classes but they also accepted bright men with no family name, like John Adams or especially Alexander Hamilton. A new country required basic knowledge. The country lacked everything. There were no engineers, no scientists. A nation of farmers needed agricultural expects. A new nation creating laws as it went along needed lawyers. And there was another way that the U.S. was different. Most European countries had an established religion. The U.S. had dozens of competing religions, each of which needed its own set of trained ministers.
So almost every time a new town was founded, two somebodies started a newspaper, five somebodies started churches, and somebody founded a college. Most were very small, most had religious affiliations, and most taught only a few classes. They might teach some Latin, a few “mechanics” courses, some animal husbandry, or teacher training. They had no pretense toward being scholarly. They gave people some basic instruction and got them out the door to get the next generation going. Many more were founded than survive today.
Over time, some colleges did thrive. They grew reputations, got better instructors, became local cultural centers. The U.S. is a huge, huge place. There was room for thousands of colleges, big and small, scholarly and instructional. States started many colleges of their own on the principle that every high school graduate was entitled to have a shot at college. States placed these colleges in small towns partially because there was less competition there, partly because it was cheaper to do so, partly because it was politically smart to spread the wealth, and partly because that meant that one was close to everybody in the state. Most states have anywhere from several to dozens of these colleges and almost every one became a college town. Every single college mentioned in this thread is a state college.
College towns are dominated by the sheer size of the college. They are equivalent to what used to be called “factory towns” because one employer was so dominant that it pretty much ran the place. College towns can be good places to live, because there’s a lot of money, lots of visitors, lots of culture, and lots of stores, far more so than in places of similar population. They can also be the equivalent of tourist traps, where everybody tried to make money off of people who don’t plan on staying very long, making them ugly in tone and spirit. Athens, Ohio, is home to Ohio University, a 20,000 student university in a 5,000 person town. The only thing Athens was known for was having 43 bars.
America still has more colleges per capita than any other country, AFAIK. That’s because its college history, like most others of its histories, is unique. I’m not sure why Canada is so different, possibly because provinces aren’t really as independent as states were in U.S. history, possibly just because the population is so much smaller, possibly because the British tradition meant more, probably bits and pieces of lots of things.