There is a thread from 2023 - ‘Loving Your Safety School’. Perhaps reading it would give you some comfort/insight. The quote below is from there. I hope this helps!
I held the line hard on budget and it was no fun, but totally necessary. DD’19 would get into an expensive school just because of things like they gave their dorm floors fanciful names. Or she wanted to go somewhere exotic. Told her she can live somewhere exotic when it can be permanent instead of moving out of dorms every year. Oh, and if you’re debt free, it will be easier to live where you want after college!
The school I steered her toward had literally everything she wanted on her super specific list. So I was not making her make a big sacrifice! And she met the top auto merit. But being 90 miles away and a pretty common destination for kids from HS made it seem undesirable and too ordinary to her. If it would have been somewhere else it probably would have been an easy sell. She came around throughout senior year and after joining admitted students FB and Snapchat realized it was going to be a bigger world than she had imagined.
In her first semester she sent me a letter thanking me for sending her there and keeping her out of debt because it was the perfect place for her. She now lives 4.5 hours away while BF does grad school, and can’t wait to move closer to home when he’s done. They are even thinking of returning to that college town her HS self thought would be so awful.
I’ve gotten flack on here before for pushing her to go there. And I admit it could have backfired if things had gone badly. But she had her head in the clouds, college funding was an abstract concept to her, and I wasn’t going to let her put her or us into financial trouble for her flights of fancy.
Sometimes mama knows.
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