I’m trying to make a decision here. One side of me is telling me to stay home and the other is telling me I should go away from home. What are the pros and cons of going to college away from home?
Unless there is a specific reason to stay home or get away from home, wouldn’t the main criteria for choosing a college be academic offerings and cost?
Of course, living with your parents would cost less than living on your own at the college (in the dorm or off-campus). But that can be accounted for when comparing costs of a nearby college to a college further away (if the further away college has a significantly lower net price otherwise, it may end up being less expensive than commuting to the nearby one).
However, living in the on-campus dorm during one’s first year of college is associated with higher graduation rates than other first year living situations.
I think it kind of depends on the student, and it depends on what staying “close to home” means vs. “getting away.” Close to home could mean commuting from home to the local regional public university 15 minutes away, or it could mean commuting to the top liberal arts college 30 minutes away, or it could mean living on campus at a college that just happens to be within a several hours’ drive of one’s parents’ home. For some students “staying home” simply means staying in the same state. Commuting (or living a short distance away on campus) to UNC or Michigan is really different from commuting to Georgia Gwinnett College or Northern Arizona University.
If you literally mean staying home as in being within a few hours of your parents, you can have the best of both worlds if you live on campus. I went to college about a 20-minute drive away from my hometown, but I lived on campus and didn’t go home very frequently especially beyond my freshman year. Honestly, by senior year it wasn’t much different than if I was attending college 200 miles away. My two sisters-in-law both went to a university that’s a 3-hour drive from our hometown, and I think they come home more often on their weekends than I ever did when I was only 20 minutes away from my parents.
Exploring your own city can also be very different as a newly semi-independent 18-year-old than it is as a teenager, although that’s highly dependent upon where you live and your pre-college experiences (I was never really allowed to hang out much in high school and almost never went into the city of Atlanta from my suburban hometown, so going out in Atlanta wasn’t much different than going out in Baltimore or Madison or Seattle - I’d never really seen it! But if you live in a small town and/or you and your HS friends have really exhausted the fun of your city, then you might want something fresh and new.) And if the local/close college is a private one or a public one that attracts students from all over the state (or out of it) you can still meet a really diverse mix of students from all over the place.
However, going far away can get you exposed to a part of the country you’ve never lived in before and wouldn’t really have gotten exposed to unless you went to college. You may also develop a level of independence you wouldn’t close to home, especially if you’re the type of student who would visit often if they were too close.
I’ve seen these data too, and I believe in them. That said, I wonder if the analysis controls for family income. It seems to me that higher-income students would be more likely to live on campus (since they can afford it), while lower-income students tend to live at home and commute. The latter are more likely to drop out of college for reasons unrelated to commuting.
If you can afford it, I would recommend going to a college where you can live on campus. This will help you get involved in student life and start to become a more independent person.
You also might be thinking “Should i look for a college in a far away state or close by?”
When choosing colleges, first I would look for :
- Do they have my major
- Is that department for my major good? Does it have a good number of professors? Do many people graduate with that major? What do they do after they graduate?
- Do my scores/GPA fit into the profile of that school?
- Can I afford this school?
Then you start thinking about:
5) Big School? Smaller School?
6) Urban/Suburban/Rural?
7) Geographic Location
I would advise you that since you don’t have a particular college picked out that is far away or a deep drive to get out of your state, that I would look for a college within 3 hours of home. That is easily driveable but still giving you some independence.
The cons for going far away are
- Cost of travellign
- You may not be able to go home for every break/holiday
- If you get sick/hurt it will be harder to get help from family
The pros are:
- You might be in a different climate that you like better
- You might be in a city that you like better or that has better job prospects
- If you dont’ want to spend as much time with your family or need that space to gain independence
I lived at home all through college. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t. As I got older, living with parents became less enjoyable. Tensions arose as I wanted to be obnoxious and my parents wanted peace and quiet, though I didn’t see it like that at the time. For us, there was never a cost issue. I just went to commuter college locally because I never thought of doing otherwise. My college years weren’t terrible, and I guess living at home had big advantages financially. I spent six years completing college, and much of that time, whole semesters, were spent travelling the world and working to get the money to do that.
I never made a single friend in college, which is weird because I am very extroverted. My leisure time was spent with work colleagues and the few friends who didn’t go away to college either. None of those friends are in my life at all, and haven’t been for decades. I think there is something to be said for the close friendships people form in college. You live in a very intense atmosphere in some ways, and I think that is why many people remain lifelong friends with people they went to college with.
I have very close friends now, interestingly from my travelling days as a young adult, because I ended up overseas and then lived there for many years after I graduated. So there is no right or wrong way of doing it. You have to do what you think you will be comfortable with.
Happykid lived at home for the first two years while attending the local community college. Then she moved just over an hour away to finish her degree at an in-state public U. This worked for our budget. Since then she’s told us that she is very glad to have had the extra time at home before having to become responsible for herself, and she’s also glad to have had the opportunity to become more independent when she did move.