As others have said, the local school seems to offer so much more than the others - for a lower price! Given the college experience is typically living in a dorm and then perhaps a nearby off campus home, it is not clear how much of the “new location” most college kids really experience.
One of mine went to a nearby university (more than 2 miles but still close). He came home a bit at first, but after that we hardly saw him.
To me, academics and finances are much more important than location in most cases. If she would be happy at the local, more prestigious and less expensive school, I would try to point out the advantages of such a place, especially if the savings mean she won’t have to take any loans or a part-time job and would be better able to take unpaid internships of interest.
You could commit part of the money you save if she chooses the local university to funding one “away”, experience each year: a summer internship in Chicago, a semester in Paris or Seoul or both, a research semester at a big US lab where she’ll need housing…
This way, she still gets to live away. 
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Thanks for all the helpful responses. I was hoping there would be consensus, and there clearly is. We really are lucky for living in such a wonderful college town. And the local university is the best choice by far, at least academically and reputationally. D24 is close to committing.
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Bostonian here. This is a pretty common dilemma in these parts.
We know families who have (or have had) kids at BC, BU, Tufts, Harvard, Northeastern, etc. As suggested above, if your student stays local, set some ground rules to support their sense of independence and autonomy.
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Agree. The key is for everyone to understand that the college kid is NOT available to sit home and wait for the repairperson to fix the dryer; pick up grandma at the airport (unless it’s a holiday and the college kid is already on break); pick up dad from his colonoscopy because “she’s so close and what else does she have to do at 8 am on a Tuesday?”
I’ve seen kids get derailed when they’re assumed to be part of the household even though they are living and sleeping in a dorm room!
And the opposite is true- I have a neighbor who does Costco runs every other week for her kid who is at a college half an hour away because “the grocery store near campus doesn’t stock the granola bars she likes”. Imagine a mother showing up at your dorm every other week with your groceries and laundry detergent? And the kid (who is clearly enabling the mom’s inability to detach) isn’t learning all those great lessons about independence…
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If all options were equal, I would say that going away to school offers the best opportunity for personal growth. But the advantages of the local option in this situation appear to make it a much better overall choice.
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Well we live in a city, very local to our state flagship. But also within an hour of many other campuses. And over the years we’ve seen many students enroll in colleges close to home, often for financial reasons.
And if kids live on campus and you set some decent boundaries both ways, they may as well be across the country. One of my friends kids was within an hour and came home once all year in recent memory. 
Mom had to go visit on campus! Especially when you have a great and highly affordable option, the location being a deal breaker would not at all be a factor for us or any reason to spend more money if budget is on the table (as it is for the vast majority).
Both my kids had very local campuses on the list until the 11th hour and it also would have been totally fine had they ended up on one of them. Congratulations!
As a side note, my college kids have regularly gotten target or prime orders for snacks, tolietries, laundry stuff, etc. Especially my oldest because he was a covid college kid. My freshman is in a city and they run out to target on transit in groups and I think that is fun for them. By my son’s last year he was doing most of his shopping. I guess that isn’t a big deal to me. Dropping a care package at a dorm meeting kid on the curb isn’t a bigger deal than having it shipped in my eyes.
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It can really depend on the kid and the family. We had neighbors whose son went to college about half an hour away. He only came home for holidays. Their daughter went to school 3 hours away and came home a lot.
I live in a wealthy area and work at a private school and I am astonished with how often some kids come home and parents go to visit. I remember there was one girl who went to University of Arizona who would fly home every weekend. I was also surprised how often some kids who went to the East Coast for school would fly home. Obviously not all the kids would do that and to each their own. But, I do think kids need to stay on campus and get involved.
If my kids had gone to college near home, we would’ve encouraged them to stay on campus and get involved and only come home for holidays. It’s all about the attitude. We are the kind of parents who think that kids don’t need to come home all time and parents don’t need to go visit their kids all the time. Not that we don’t want to see our kids, but part of living on campus at college is about being on campus and not just coming home all the time.
Also, if your kid goes nearby to college, maybe keep the car at home, at least for the first year?
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