Travel is a huge variable not accounted for well in the total COA figures colleges give. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the travel figures they use more or less reflect the average travel costs of their student body. But it only stands to reason that most students will fall either below or above the average, in many cases by wide margins.
My D1 attended a very highly regarded LAC in suburban Philadelphia. Roughly 12% of the college’s entering class come from Pennsylvania, and I’d hazard a guess that a large majority of those come from the Philadelphia metro area. For those kids, travel costs are the price of a few public transit tickets and/or the cost of Mom or Dad doing a few drop-offs and pick-ups on a trip of well under an hour in each direction, if well timed, and in many cases much less. That is to say, negligible. Another 32% come from “other Mid-Atlantic states.” Assuming that’s basically New York to Virginia (heavily concentrated in the DC suburbs at the southern end), you’re looking at roughly a 2-hour car ride or the cost of a relatively inexpensive train or bus ticket, unless you choose premium train service. Again, cheap, cheap, cheap. Another 13% come from New England. Of these, probably a good many come from the southern and western parts of Connecticut that are basically suburban New York, so again, very low travel costs. Another large fraction come from greater Boston, a longer haul but still only 5 hours by car assuming favorable traffic, or 6 hours by Megabus. That’s well over half the class whose travel costs are likely to be well below the average for the college as a whole, or at least could be kept well below the average if that’s a priority.
At the other extreme are international students, for whom each round trip could easily be $1,000 or more if coming from Europe and substantially more if coming from other continents. Keeping total travel costs down, however, is the fact that almost no international students go home for (U.S.) Thanksgiving, which isn’t celebrated in their countries and is too brief a window for most international travel; many don’t go home for fall or spring breaks because costs are prohibitive; and some don’t even go home for winter break, between the fall and spring semesters. Some, however, travel within the U.S. to be with friends or extended family members during these periods; those costs will vary widely.
Costs will also vary among U.S. students from outside the Northeast. Some will have relatively painless and inexpensive connections to Philadelphia. We live in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, a few minutes drive from the MSP airport which is a Delta hub with non-stop service to Philadelphia. D1’s college was an easy public transit ride to the PHL airport, a hub for US Airways with non-stop service to MSP. That meant there was direct head-to-head competition between two major carriers, which kept airfares reasonable, often around $300 per r/t ticket. And waiting in the wings was Southwest which serves both cities, albeit with connecting flights; but that generally kept downward pressure on airfares (and we sometimes used southwest when that was the least cost option). If either our home or the college was not near a major airline hub, airfares would be higher and travel times longer. And even being someplace with hub-to-hub service is no guarantee of cheap airfares, Both MSP and Detroit (DTW) are Delta hubs, with frequent, non-stop service between the two; but because no other carrier elects to compete on that route, it often costs twice as much to fly to Detroit from here as it does to Philadelphia, although the flight to Philadelphia is about twice as long. And driving is generally not an option for us; it’s nearly 1,200 miles and 18 hours of driving time in each direction for us, which means not only gas, tolls, depreciation, maintenance, etc., but also hotel and restaurant bills on the road and massive investments of parental time. We did those trips in initially getting D1 to college and in helping her close down at the end of college; those costs were many multiples of the college’s estimated average travel costs.
Bottom line: don’t take the college’s word for it. Travel cost will be reflected somewhere in published COA, but usually not broken out as a separate line item; it will often appear as part of a broader category, like “books, supplies, travel, and personal expenses.” Assume your travel costs will not be average; in all probability, they’ll be higher or lower, often by a wide margin. It’s worth the time and effort to do your own estimate of travel costs, based on current airfares, travel times, other transportation options, expected frequency of travel, etc., as well as summer storage costs, shipping costs if not traveling by car, and any parental travel costs either at the outset for initial set-up or at the end for graduation and shut-down, and at whatever points in between you may elect to visit. Then compare these costs college-to-college. You may find this accounts for several thousand dollars per year difference in COA, not reflected in the colleges’ published COA estimates.