<p>Benley, I’d like to go back to your post 125, if you don’t mind.</p>
<p>"The kid mentioned in my earlier post took a summer internship in a midwestern/southern city (It was the best opportunity he could get that summer and I did think that’s a “safer” way of having a taste of a different region). It turned out he enjoyed that experience tremendously, and felt quite at home. Granted he was somewhat “sheltered” while he was there and it was a relatively brief stay, but from what he described, the city was indeed a city like - a typical city we are familiar with. "</p>
<p>This is exactly what I mean when I talk about the provincialism of CC. You seemed really surprised that a city in a midwestern/southern city would … well, resemble a city. Why is that? Why <em>wouldn’t</em> you have assumed that a city in the midwest or south (or west) would, generally speaking, resemble a city elsewhere? What did you <em>think</em> it was going to be – cornfields and cow-tipping? What’s the point of being from the sophisticated northeast if that doesn’t include a general handle on things? </p>
<p>Benley: You are saying the NE elite, need blind, FA only schools become very attractive choices to applicants cross country because their FA policies are more generous? This is the recruiting you mean? If so, and if it is correct they are more generous than schools outside of the NE, I am in agreement with you. When some schools went to grant only aid, no loans, and raised family income necessary to qualify for FA - I would guess that increased interest in those schools from some who might not have otherwise considered them.</p>
<p>One of the most illuminating threads on CC was the thread in which it was discussed ad nauseum how Oh So Very Difficult it was to get on a plane and travel to the midwest or south – but funnily enough, that problem didn’t exist with Stanford, which apparently has much shorter flights (/sarcasm). I particularly call bs on it when it’s being said by very affluent families, who have spent tons of time / money flying around for their children’s activities and sports, have perhaps taken the family to Europe a few times, etc. but yep, getting on a plane to MPLS or ORD is apparently like climbing Mt Everest. </p>
<p>PG: I don’t mind but I won’t respond to your “inquiry” on this thread. Hope you understand. If it helps, cover the poster’s name when you read different posts. We cannot take a poster’s hidden or stated bias too seriously on anonymous message board can we? I’d suggest responding to posts not posters but that’s just me. Everyone can do what the feel right. I do have said all I have to about this topic though. Thanks for addressing my comments.</p>
<h1>162 - Well in our case the kids didn’t want to go far from home. I wasn’t sure it was going to be possible to get them out of daily commuting distance until well into senior year. Even though they had done a whole lot of travel with us, they didn’t like the idea at all of being that far away from Mom & Dad. And I spent a lot of time freshman year on the phone and making campus visits.They only applied to schools within a few hours drive and those in cities where close family members lived. They did not apply to CA schools. Ten years after college they live either on the opposite coast or overseas. So it all worked out okay for us.</h1>
<p>Do you think east coast parents should be encouraging their kids to apply out of region?</p>
<p>So, everyone should send their kids to college in a different geographic region? That is the idea? Or just northeast parents should do this?</p>
<p>adding: In my new southern state, where getting into the flagship is a really big deal and my rural neighbors want their kids to come back and live on family land after college - they should instead be insisting those kids go out of state? I can’t agree with that. </p>
<p>I am just not buying into the idea you have to leave home to get rid of provincial prejudices.</p>
<p>My nephew from DC discovered it was a lot easier to get to Houston than to Cornell. Though I think the initial move in without a car was probably trickier to manage. We certainly found it easier to the the 3+ hour drive to Boston than the 6+ hour drive to Pittsburgh which required an overnight stay in a hotel.</p>
<p>Personally, I think everyone should at least consider going to college in a different region of the country. I didn’t do that, but I did spend a gap year before grad schoo traveling around the country with a grant to study fire station architecture and then after grad school I worked for two years in the Los Angeles area. (I’ve also lived in France for a year and Germany for five years - and would say that spending time outside the US is a good idea too.)</p>
<p>PG, it’s not that it’s “that hard” to travel to various Midwest locations because of the distance and flight time, it’s that there simply are not as many available and affordable flights from the NE as there are for other destinations such as cities in Florida, Texas, and Calif… Flying to Pittsburgh, which isn’t even the true Midwest, from Phila. or Newark can be a real bear and often very expensive. Also, flights get cancelled constantly.</p>
<p>It is pretty much a luxury to be able to afford going out of region to college, except I think Benley does make a good point about FA policies making some northeast schools pretty attractive financially.</p>
<p>By definition, then, this would be every first year college student, then.</p>
<p>Actually, I found that moving to a new part of the country in the past year has enlightened me quite a bit to my own biases and blind spots, even though I’ve considered myself to be quite open minded most of my adult life.</p>
<p>Everyone could use to spend some years in a place they aren’t used to. It forces us to learn to listen, to reach out to new people and to adjust our way of viewing the world. Nobody is immune to provincialism. Stay in one place long enough and you stay the same. No matter how open minded you might think you are.</p>
<p>College is a great opportunity to assist our kids in finding new ways of seeing the world.</p>
<p>But, our age, too, is a great time to move and find a new perspective.</p>
<p>Sorry I was away and missed this thread until now.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I sort of wish Pizzagirl and bclintonk had gone the extra step and adjusted their population index for (a) relative number of kids attending college and/or (b) distribution of SAT/ACT scores >/= 1400/33. The first is easy to get from the Census Bureau; I am not certain about the second, but you may be able to tease it out of publicly available data. I don’t think it would make a huge difference in the analysis, but I think it would make some difference. There is no question that there is a significant difference between overall state populations and number of college-aged kids in each state (more kids relative to population in the West, far fewer in the Midwest), and also regional differences in college attendance. And I think there’s also no question that some states are “smarter” than others, and those advantages are not evenly distributed among the regions.</p></li>
<li><p>Of course, the real definition of “national” is “It’s not in my region, but I recognize it as a prestigious place to go.” Or “It’s in my region, but lots of great kids get rejected because they are admitting too many kids from outside the area.” It’s hard to measure those things with easily-available statistics, and you get different answers depending on where you are.</p></li>
<li><p>It’s really not that surprising that colleges are so regional. When I am talking to kids about law schools, one of the things I always say is that there’s only one law school (Harvard) that comes close to being a “national” law school, and even there it’s barely true. Medical schools, too, are essentially regional, with the possible exception of 2-3 schools.</p></li>
<li><p>Virginia is NOT in the Northeast. I understand the temptation to put it there, but it’s not. Also, it’s hardly surprising that WashU does well in the South, because I think of St. Louis as, at least in part, Southern. There’s no good way to account for “border” issues without doing way too much work or way too much simplification.</p></li>
<li><p>It’s funny how people can look at some of this data and still spout received wisdom like "No one in California wants to go to pricey schools in the Northeast. The data show that many of the Northeastern colleges have just about proportional representation from the West . . . and it ain’t coming from Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.</p></li>
</ol>
<h1>171 poetgrl: I used to agree with this absolutely. Now I’m not so sure. I have lived all over and come full circle. Now I see the value in staying put. That is a different discussion than the one here, though.</h1>
<p>This is just not true at all. Both Chicago and Minneapolis are major hubs with literally hundreds of flights a day all over the country. And they’re not “more expensive” for the most part.</p>
<p>I did a quick search for flights out of Baltimore. There are MANY more nonstops to ORD or MSP than to SFO, for instance.</p>
<p>BWI-ORD $186 (2 hrs)
BWI-MSP $327 (2:45) or $219 with a stop (5)
BWI-SFO $529 (6:11) or $361 (7:37)–and there is only ONE nonstop a day, on United</p>
<p>I also did BWI-DSM for a hypothetical kid going to Grinnell.</p>
<p>BWI-DSM $378 (4 hours), multiple options</p>
<p>I have lived in a city with a regional airport for two decades. Connecting flights can be a pain but they are not always more expensive than nonstops.</p>
<p>JHS, that’s the one area I’m not entirely comfortable with my assumption - are some states / regions “smarter” than others? It’s certainly plausible if measured by SAT or ACT. The problem with using EITHER SAT or ACT to measure that is the inherent regionality of those tests themselves, though. If there were one national test administered everywhere, that would be a lot easier to use. </p>
<p>BTW I do think legacy and/or development may help “tight-skew” more - as it wouldn’t surprise me that the distribution of a college’s alumni base is skewed to the college’s home region. </p>
<p>Re VA in the Northeast: Again, I’m going to point at bclintonk because that’s how he gave me the data, and the way he gave it to me, I can’t unspool it myself And yes, there is no way to account for “soft border” issues. Census regions are certainly imperfect, and I wish I actually had the data by metropolitan statistical areas of some sort, which are a better representation of reality. (For example, metro Chicago - which includes part of NW Indiana - is a better / tighter “region” than Illinois the state, which includes super-urban and super-rural. And Maine looks nothing like Massachusetts in terms of urbanity, but they’re lumped together.)</p>
<p>Re your last point, I suspect that in actually, CA is overindexed but UT, NV, ID, etc. are uninderexed which draws the overall region index back down to flat. And even within CA, I’d surmise that’s largely driven by metro SF, metro LA and metro SD. </p>
<p>“PG, it’s not that it’s “that hard” to travel to various Midwest locations because of the distance and flight time, it’s that there simply are not as many available and affordable flights from the NE as there are for other destinations such as cities in Florida, Texas, and Calif.”</p>
<p>Oh come ON now. I’m a very frequent flyer, I know better. That is just ludicrous to suggest that it’s “harder” for someone in the NE to get to ORD or MPLS compared to, say, Texas or California. There are flights all the livelong day. I know, I travel to the NE all the time. </p>
<p>If they can afford it, which most cannot, ALL parents should encourage their kids to apply out of region, IMO. But even if affordable, most 'rents will not encourage out of region bcos they can’t bear the idea that little Johnny/Suzie et al will “so far away from home.”</p>
<p>DH has always traveled for work and has flown internationally and to different regions in the US. Currently he travels to Pittsburgh and the Midwest and his flights are regularly cancelled and almost always late. This was not typical for his past business travel. As for cost, I was talking about Pittsburgh and mean cost relative to mileage.</p>
And yes, there is no way to account for “soft border” issues. Census regions are certainly imperfect, and I wish I actually had the data by metropolitan statistical areas of some sort, which are a better representation of reality. (For example, metro Chicago - which includes part of NW Indiana - is a better / tighter “region” than Illinois the state, which includes super-urban and super-rural. And Maine looks nothing like Massachusetts in terms of urbanity, but they’re lumped together.)</p>