My kids both went to college at a private university 700 miles away, and neither returned home (or, for that matter, to our state). One lives and works where he went to college; the other is in New York City, where, to be fair, she had wanted to live since she was 8. Both would consider moving to our city at this point, but they are both more or less nailed in place for the moment by good jobs and good relationships.
How many of us live where we grew up? In my family, at least, people have moved around, a lot.
I grew up in the bosom of a large extended family in a city in the near-Midwest. My maternal grandmother was one of six siblings who grew up there, and the oldest four of them lived their whole adult lives there, most of the time on the same block, despite the fact that all of them and all of their spouses had gone away somewhere else to college. In my mother’s generation, there were 16 first cousins, 10 of whom grew up in that city, and five of whom settled permanently there – not on the same block, but in the same neighborhood – with one more who lived about an hour away. All but a couple of them had gone away to college, too. Those six first cousins raised 21 kids in or near their city, my generation . . . and of that group, my second cousins and siblings, there are two who live there now as adults. Including one of my sisters, who didn’t return until 12 years after she finished college across the country, and then left again for five years before returning. There were two other second cousins of mine who died, one who always lived there and one who came and went for years, and whose widow and children still live in the area, and another who has also sometimes lived there and sometimes not, and right now it’s not. Still, that’s at most 5/21, and only two of them lived there continuously after college (well, one of them didn’t spend much time in college).
I have more relatives from that quadrant of my family now in New York City, Chicago, L.A., or the Bay Area than I have in my native city, where any kind of family party once meant a minimum of 50+ people. That’s the story of the Rust Belt.
But it’s not just the Rust Belt. My wife’s parents and their siblings all grew up and were educated in New York City, but only two (of six) stayed there as adults, and only one of my wife’s generation in those families lives there now, with one more about 45 minutes north on the Hudson Line. My in-laws made certain their four children went to college within easy driving distance from where they lived (which was in western New England, and easy driving distance included a heck of a lot of fine colleges). Only one of four, however settled as an adult within the easy-drive radius.
Others of my second cousins grew up in more glamorous, vibrant places than I – Washington DC, Berkeley, Philadelphia – and only one of nine lived her adult life mainly where she grew up (but only after a number of years in Ghana and then Wisconsin).
At one point, a couple of decades ago, I had cousins I was fairly close to living in Tokyo, Geneva, Paris, Dar-es-Salaam, Capetown, Jakarta, Stockholm, and a small town outside Fairbanks. None had gone to college close to home. (Things have compressed a bit since – only Stockholm still lives outside the US.)
To be fair, my three cousins who grew up in the San Fernando Valley have barely budged, ever None of them has lived as an adult east of Brentwood, west of Camarillo, or north of either. One started college in Texas, but finished at Pepperdine, one went to UC - Davis, and the other took some classes sometimes at Northridge. Two other, much younger cousins grew up in Pacific Palisades, and they are both back in SoCal after college in the Boston area. So maybe the secret isn’t so much going to college in-state as living in a warm place near some great beaches.
