you completely missed the part where i said "while not necessary"

> Join a large church and you can probably meet people in every city too, and you won't need to take out huge loans to do it.

most people only go to their local church. Many people from my uni were from out of state

I went to school in Massachusetts and I made a lot of friends who live in Massachusetts but I didn't exactly meet a world-wide network of friends. I was thinking you were talking about something like an alumni association, where your connection isn't really any less tenuous than with people belonging to your same denomination.

some of my friends were already from those big cities. others were from the suburbs and moved to a big city after college.

I don't contact random alumni, unless we already have several mutual friends in common. Or were part of the same student associations.