"Then again, the definition of “far away” to college may have changed with transportation technology and cost. A generation ago, airplane travel was more expensive, and cars were less pleasant and less reliable for long drives. "
Oh please. Cars were fine for long distance. I assure you we had planes back then and my family thought nothing of getting on a plane for travel - domestic or international. Please don’t act like airplane travel was just invented. We went to college with plenty of kids from all over the country - and world for that matter. I had sorority sisters from the UK, South Africa and Colombia.
“people on CC who encourage their kids to apply anywhere in the USA…even though there are equivelent schools nearer…it seems “cool”…but then later when their kid can’t make it home for Thanksgiving or barely makes Christmas flights because of the snow it isn’t so cool.”
I don’t want to raise kids who can’t just get on a plane and go someplace without making it a huge deal.
Cars were bigger then, and you weren’t bound in by those pesky seat belts :-). Honestly, ucb, it’s like your knowledge comes from books rather than real life. Peopje took car trips - to the shore, to Disney, national parks, camping, etc. Honest. Plenty of us in our 50s / 60s grew up bouncing around in the backs of station wagons. Please stop acting as though it was a big deal to take a car trip.
I’m sure people from my high school went away to college but I didn’t know many of them. And I didn’t realize taking a trip to tour colleges was even a thing. Most families I knew couldn’t afford a yearly vacation, much less one planned around visiting schools. If a lot of students were able to go away to college, they certainly weren’t people in our income bracket.
I remember riding in cars of the time and learning to drive on them. Lots of carsickness from wallowy suspension, inefficient space usage that meant that big cars were not always that big on the inside, more noise and fumes, and lots of reliability problems.
ok, you win, ucb. I must have been dreaming to think that people took Sunday drives and went down the shore and went to world’s fairs and went to the Poconos or the Catskills or visited Yellowstone or Mount Rushmore or Disneyworld or grandma in Florida. Eisenhower hadn’t invented the highway system by the 1980s. Apparently people drove to the grocery store and back and that was the end of it.
@Pizzagirl, I think that families who think nothing of getting on a plane for travel – either then or now – are not the families who think that it’s odd to go far away to college.
@ucbalumnus@Pizzagirl Your sparring about rides in the back of station wagons brings back soooo many funny memories… Four kids in my family, no seatbelts, multiple moves that required driving back and forth across the country. And, parents who liked to go touring. The worst carsickness I remember was being in the back of the station wagon, driving through the Redwood Forest and winding along roads up to Crater Lake in Oregon. My poor father had to spend the night at a laundromat washing all of our sleeping bags because of me…I also recall a breakdown on the highway on our way to Disneyland one day… That was scary.
Back to colleges ---- I think that staying in-state is super practical on a lot of levels - easy distance from home, in-state tuition, etc.
But, I also think that sometimes people who go far away to college do so because they have moved around a bit in their lives and don’t feel tied to a set region or state. Am thinking of state department, military, corporate folks, etc who transfer every few years for their jobs. My parents were very middle class (Navy), but we all went to colleges thousands of miles from home, probably because we had lived so many places and wanted to try something new again. Plus, my parents moved three times during my four years of college, so I’m guessing there really wasn’t an “in-state” option. My parents were pretty focused on private colleges for us anyway, so it all worked out.
Thus, it was not just the wealthy who went to college far from home, even back in the dark ages of the 80s. Somehow my parents managed to get us all to college on planes and avoid bankruptcy! We made it home a few times each year. We definitely didn’t go home for the short breaks, but were able to visit relatives or friends, so we didn’t have to stay on campus.
My own two kids have chosen to go far away for college as well. Like my parents, we are also a Navy family and not wealthy, but, somehow we are making it work.
??? Where did you get that from? Sure there are some, but it’s hardly a prime destination. If you want to talk OOS state flagships, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan would be the big draws.
"But, I also think that sometimes people who go far away to college do so because they have moved around a bit in their lives and don’t feel tied to a set region or state. Am thinking of state department, military, corporate folks, etc who transfer every few years for their jobs. "
This is definitely true in some cases. I was kind of the opposite. Came from an area where very few people go far away. I went to a private HS where almost everyone went to college, but probably 85-90% stayed in state. I can think of maybe 5 of us who went more than one state away. I went over 1000 miles away. One other person in my class went a similar distance.
My family had never traveled and we lived in a very small town that I HATED. I wanted to get as far away as possible and I felt sure, as only a teenager can, that if I didn’t get the heck out of Dodge for college I never would. I ended up returning to my home state a year after college graduation. I didn’t intend to stay. But I moved to a larger city than the one I grew up in (my parents had moved) and as it turned out, I like it much more. I’m still here.
My son kind of wanted to go out of state but it didn’t work out. He did refuse to apply to the flagship which is local, and ended up an hour away. Daughter never seemed interested in going too far. She never seemed opposed either–by that I mean, if she had happened to discover a program she liked that was far away, distance wouldn’t have stopped her. But she felt no need to go away for the sake of going away and for a long time thought she would attend our flagship. In a way, I think that’s a good thing compared to my “I hate it here” perspective at her age.
To be clear, I am pretty sure I would still not ever want to live in the small town I grew up in. So that wasn’t just teenage angst.
I was joking, but there are a ton of students at CU from Chicago. California, Texas and Chicago send a good number of the OOS students, and CU is about 40% OOS.
I live in Maine, so there are a lot of colleges within 3-5 hours drive. As it happened, S chose Dartmouth, 3 hrs away. I can’t deny that it was convenient to be able to do the round trip in one day, but we were totally open to his choosing Pomona, which would have been another kettle of fish.
I have to confess that the mentality that wants to keep one’s kid living at home through college is totally foreign to me.
I mean, I love my kid, and I miss him, and I’d like to have more time to just hang out with him and chat about stuff like books, which we do by phone, but I can’t imagine constricting his life that way.
Pot’s not legal at CU either for those under 21, and not legal in most places on campus (buildings, plazas, walkways).
I don’t think there is any more pot on campus today than there was in the 70’s and 80’s. There is plenty, but not out in the open.
In all seriousness, the bigger problem is marijuana food products, like candy and cookies. There is no way to estimate the amount of pot in 5 pieces of candy or in 2 cookies.
Yes, @bclintonk and I tumbled the numbers a few years ago. The only top 20 places in the RU and LAC categories that do not primarily overskew to their home regions are Duke and Oberlin. The Ivies are just as regional as other top schools (and some of them even more so). People don’t want to believe it, though. In our analysis, we primarily believe it’s simply due to the regionality of the applicant pool. That’a backed up by work bclintonk did showing how relatively few students send SAT II’s outside their home region.
