Agree 100%. Parents are often truly unaware of how they will fund the “You can spend 30K per year” budget until it’s April and they’re realizing that in the last 9 months, they replaced the brakes on the car, had to buy a new refrigerator when the compressor died, and the roofer told them “you have 6 months until the little leak in the master bedroom becomes a deluge”.
Reality means that appliances don’t stop breaking just because your kid is in college, and reality means that the phantom savings you think you’re getting when you are no longer feeding a teenager (and all of his friends) gets replaced by NEW expenses– an unexpected trip home because grandma is dying; another unexpected trip home when the kid has developed some weird allergy and can’t get an appointment with an allergist for 4 months so you bring him home to see his regular provider, etc. Those trips add up, whether plane, train, automobile or Greyhound bus.
So having a kid who decides “I’m happy to spread a wide net but may just pick the cheapest as long as the place works for me” isn’t a bad thing. Unless the kid is truly picking a sub-optimal choice….