<p>Oh, and by the way, we started saving for both college educations 20 years ago (before they were born), took fewer vacations, drove our cars until they fell apart and always put money in the college funds first.</p>
<p>Blucroo
</p>
<p>My point is that the “distance problem” is not necessarily about parents not wanting to let go. Your own particular wonderful sounding circumstances simply do not make the case for the majority of families.</p>
<p>*But, it was her choice to go across country. She is going to a school that appears to be a perfect match for her personality and goals and she is thrilled at the opportunities she will have to live in a city like Boston. *</p>
<p>My daughter felt the same way- only she didn’t have to go across country to find a perfect match and only some of her friends and the[president]( <a href=“http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1155606914229530.xml&coll=7”>http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1155606914229530.xml&coll=7</a>) are from Boston :)</p>
<p>Well, we live in Boston, and my son can’t wait to get on an airplane and go to school somewhere else. ;)</p>
<p>Given the choice between hoping for my D to come back to her hometown after college and finding something fulfilling that she wants to do wherever that might lead her, I’m going to go with the latter every time. The unstated fear of many parents seems to be, “If they go away to college, they may not come back home [to the hometown].” To which I say, “And so? And the problem is?”</p>
<p>Transportation costs are figured into the EFC calculations, so cost of going away shouldn’t be a major consideration. Instead of shipping stuff, buy stuff locally as needed. And, yes, it may be that they don’t come home for Thanksgiving or Spring break. Deal. </p>
<p>In contrast, my D’s roommate last year went home virtually every single weekend. Gah.</p>
<p>TD,</p>
<p>May your wish come true.</p>
<p>"Transportation costs are figured into the EFC calculations, so cost of going away shouldn’t be a major consideration. "</p>
<p>Sorry, but I disagree. For those of us who don’t live near major airports, the cost of airfare can be astronomical. In addition, gas prices are rising so much that even driving long distances can be unaffordable — if one is lucky enough to have that kind of time.</p>
<p>I’ve watched airfare climb from about $200 roundtrip to the hub a 5 hour drive away to $600 roundtrip when the only low airfare carrier pulled out of our area. There is a captive audience of business travelers, so carriers here can charge what they choose to. S does not have his own car. We don’t live in a place that he’d likely be able to catch a ride to. There is not even train service to my city. </p>
<p>I just paid $330 to fly to a major city that’s about 700 miles away. That was a wonderful fare that I was able to get by being extremely flexible in my plans and by not traveling during peak times. If my kid, however, were going to school there, we wouldn’t have that kind of option: He’d be coming home for Christmas and at the end of the school year during peak times.</p>
<p>Similarly, if my kid had a summer orientation that parents were invited to, we’d be paying a heckuva lot of money. Driving wouldn’t be an option because we wouldn’t have that kind of time.</p>
<p>I watch friends who are pinching pennies drive 16 hours one-way to visit their kid for parents’ weekend and to pick her up for spring break and at the end of the school year. </p>
<p>I do think that going away from home is an experience that allows young people to test their wings. At the same time, however, I think it’s very rare that a student really has to go 800-2,000 miles from home in order to find a college that’s a good match, and to have a sense of independence and responsibility. The U.S. has thousands of colleges that are very diverse, and IMO most students can find a wonderful fit within a couple of hours drive of their hometown. </p>
<p>If students choose to go farther from home, that’s fine, too, but I don’t think it’s necessary for most people to do that in order to have a fulfilling experience and to develop independence. I also think that for many people who have financial concerns, it’s not financially feasible for students to go to college that are very far from home.</p>
<p>This thread bugs me (in case you couldn’t tell), and I’ll tell you why (thanks for asking):</p>
<p>It is not a badge of honor that you’ve managed to send your kid to the other side of the earth for college. This thinking is just more of the “prestige” complex too many parents, and kids!, suffer from when it comes to choosing a college.</p>
<p>I’m sorry, but certain attitudes annoy me: that private school is always better than public school; that the other coast is better than this coast; the ‘look how independent my kid is because s/he is a million miles away’ falacy; the ‘we’ve suffered years of poverty to send Johnny to the school of his dreams’ mantra; the ‘we’d do ANYTHING to send Suzie the college that is the best “fit”’ mentality…aaarrrgh…the list goes on and on.</p>
<p>Where a kid ends up at school is a complex decision. Most families need finances to be their guide – maybe they are not the families represented on here – but that doesn’t make it unreal. Healthy families make these decisions together, based on many many factors, unless of course a kid is paying their own way.</p>
<p>I just don’t buy that a kid 2000 miles from home, spending $50,000 of daddy’s money every year, is necessarily any more “independent” or mature than the kid struggling through his local state U with loans. </p>
<p>Perhaps, quite the contrary!</p>
<p>Sorry for the rant, I’m done now… 
</p>
<p>NSM, D’s college figures the tranportation cost, whatever it is, in the budget for financial aid. If you have high airline ticket costs, they adjust accordingly.</p>
<p>Weenie, the net cost to us is only marginally higher than if D had stayed close and gone to flagship state school; at least for us, it’s no kind of economic issue. It was a family decision and D had some articulated criteria that TheMom and I got on board about. I have to admit, given that her experience is meeting or actually exceeding expectations, I feel that D…and we…are very very very lucky, only a couple of orders of magnitude lower than winning the state lottery.</p>
<p>“NSM, D’s college figures the tranportation cost, whatever it is, in the budget for financial aid. If you have high airline ticket costs, they adjust accordingly.”</p>
<p>I know that’s supposed to be the case, but with skyrocketing oil costs, I don’t think that the financial aid would keep up with my own costs Remember, too, that the colleges calculate transportation costs as trips to college at the year’s beginning, from college at the school year’s end, and home and back for Christmas. That doesn’t include trips for family emergencies, parents’ weekend, or (to my knowledge) for orientation. That’s why I see families struggling to find ways of affording transportation for students from my area who are at faraway colleges.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I doubt that S would qualify for much need-based aid anyway.</p>
<p>Weenie,</p>
<p>I’m behind you 100% on this…my own daughter goes to community college and is very independent. As a matter of fact, fall semester starts next week and she is registered for 5 classes but has also decided to sit in on 17 additional classes for the week just to “sample” the courses to see what she might be interested in following up on. Our community college is a wonderful place to take advantage of such opportunities. I think many people have an elitist attitude toward community and state colleges that is totally unfounded, but those will be the same people who look down their noses at Toyotas even when they have the same engine as a Lexus…and by the way, we own a Toyota, too :)</p>
<p>TheDad – you are correct in that the costs of transportation is included in the EFC, but if the EFC = COA, it’s still an additional expense. Some people in that situation find it hard enough to come up with the COA – in our case, we told son that if he wanted to go far away, there had better be some merit money involved. He opted for an expensive school, so it had to be the one with the fewest additional expenses, including travel expenses.</p>
<p>As others have pointed out- EFC is still a struggle to come up with.
I didn’t forbid my D to look at schools 3000 miles away, in fact I suggested some. BUt ease of getting around her college area- without depending on others- ruled out rural locations. Ease of getting back and forth between home, pushed schools on this coast higher on her list.</p>
<p>YEs we would have all learned to deal- But we have no relatives in other areas, our time does count, and knowing that missed flights, airline strikes, traffic around the airport and the cost of airfare are at least things we didn’t routinely have to “deal” with, was sweet.</p>
<p>I admit that we could have driven there and back in the time that one of her trains was delayed, but they ended up going to a profs house and had a good time, so even though she was less than 200 miles away- she still learned independent thought :)</p>
<p>emeraldkity: Actually, the President is not from Boston. He is from Kennebunkport Maine and went to school at Yale, which is in Connecticut last I checked.</p>
<p>blucroo – I believe that emeraldkity was referring to the President of Reed, Colin Diver. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I would guess that she is aware that President Bush attended Yale, although he spent most of his childhood in Texas.</p>
<p>Colin Diver and his wife lived and raised their sons in Boston during the 1960s in a neighborhood that was undergoing rapid gentrification. Their experiences with school desegregation and racial equality were chronicled in New York Times journalist J. Anthony Lukas’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Common Ground. This in turn became a 1990 made-for-TV movie of the same name</p>
<p>From Wikipedia.</p>
<p>*I believe that emeraldkity was referring to the President of Reed, Colin Diver. * </p>
<p>yes
I know that [Diver](<a href=“Colin Diver - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Diver</a>) was dean of the UPenn law school, but more of us may be familiar with him through the book and TV movie Common Ground( played by Richard Thomas) , about the intergration of Boston schools, in the 1960’s</p>
<p>( oop- we must have posted at same time Marite- )</p>
<p>He seems to have taken to Portland quite well-
Most of Ds friends that have graduated, also took to Portland, while many of them are well outside the area, they are still coming back to Portland for graduation/Renn Fayre/winter break</p>
<p>* and yes I also know that Bush was born in New Haven, although he grew up in Midland, Texas* :)</p>
<p>Oh sorry, missed the Reed part earlier in the thread!</p>
<p>Given all the other risks and uncertainties in life in general and stress of college in particular (for both parents and student), I don’t think driving to the airport a few times a year and having DS or DD go through airport security is a big deal, nor should it be a major consideration in the college decision. It is probably still statistically safer to fly to the other side of the country than to drive 3 or 4 hours to the other side of the state.</p>
<p>Finances, of course, are an important consideration for almost all families. And transportation costs are not trivial. But financial aid from some “far away” private colleges can make the cost of attendance competitive with staying more local.</p>
<p>I’m glad my DS is open to looking at colleges that fit him well on both coasts and in the middle of the country, too. We’ll have to see where he gets in, and then it will be decision time next April.</p>
<p>"Given all the other risks and uncertainties in life in general and stress of college in particular (for both parents and student), I don’t think driving to the airport a few times a year and having DS or DD go through airport security is a big deal, nor should it be a major consideration in the college decision. "</p>
<p>In addition to the financial concerns, which your post mentioned, there also are concerns related to convenience. Many people are not served by major airports or for that matter any airports at all and may have to drive for hours to get to one. Depending on the weather where one lives and where one’s kid goes to school, this can be difficult. </p>
<p>Many parents also don’t have the kind of vacation , leisure time, reliable personal transportation or health to be able to take lots of time off to get kids to and from college. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, we are very lucky that in the U.S. for most students, it’s possible to find colleges within a couple of hundred miles where the student can be well educated and fulfilled. IMO, most students could be equally happy, educated and fulfilled at a variety of colleges in the U.S.</p>