@Pizzagirl @twoinanddone While there is pot on virtually every college campus, many of my friends have stated that we would not consider sending our kids to college in a state which has legalized marijuana for general public use. No need to make pot more accessible to kids whose brains are still developing and who just don’t need extra distraction.
Okay - not sure why that’s being addressed to me, since I’m pretty indifferent about pot one way or the other and I was just making a joke about Colorado, but whatever, that’s your right to set that criteria!
We took plenty of long car and airplane trips growing up. Kids in my HS also mostly left the state for school, though not usually far (this was NYC and most chose a college in the northeast but not all). My family wasn’t wealthy at all but did themselves move far away from home to live after college, more than once. Most kids in my HS were quite wealthy.
I do remember, as a kid, meeting kids in the summer at my grandparents’ houses who had never left their county in their lives (a county I was visiting from 1000+ miles away). They were not particularly poor, maybe working to middle class, just had parents who didn’t feel travel - with the kids anyway - was a priority. My D recently met someone like that so I guess they still exist.
Certainly where I live now most kids go to school in state, and most to publics. This is a fairly wealthy district and our state schools are good. In fact the wealthier families seem to choose state schools in large numbers because they’re a good deal for full pay families, the parents are alumni, whatever. That doesn’t mean they don’t go to Europe for a summer vacation or don’t ski in Utah or Colorado, they just don’t think private east coast schools are worth the additional cost.
Re pot: It’s hard to imagine formal legalization making a meaningful difference in the availability of pot to college students on a college campus. You can’t really get much more available than generally available everywhere. and I think on most college campuses marijuana is generally available everywhere, or awfully close to that. @MOMANDBOYSTWO 's position is pretty much symbolic.
Re distance: A big part of my attitude comes from the fact that both my parents traveled some real distance to college. My mother – to spite her mother, who wanted her to go to the mother’s alma mater hundreds of miles in the opposite direction – got herself a full ride scholarship to a LAC in California, the other side of the country. It was a three-day train trip in each direction, and she made the round trip once a year. Of course, that wasn’t normal at the time, but it obviously wasn’t impossible or unheard-of. My father went from Newark NJ to Wesleyan – less than 100 miles as the crow flies, but psychically it might well have been on another planet. My mother’s mother, and all my mother’s and grandmother’s siblings, and most of their children, had also gone reasonably far away to college. That was my clan as I was growing up, and it was a clan of people whose norm was going to college hundreds (at least) of miles from home.
Pot is just as available on Colorado college campuses as it ever was. It’s just as available to those under 21 as beer and alcohol.
Legal pot (bought from a store) and medical pot are expensive, so the illegal stuff is still more popular with college kids.
As I said, I think the bigger danger is from the edibles - candy, cookies, gum, baking items - not from the stuff that’s been around for decades and is just as available in other states. It’s not legal in Hawaii, but do you not think there is pot on the college campuses there?
@twoinanddone @JHS I definitely acknowledged up front that pot is sadly prevalent on college campuses. I still would not pay OOS tuition to a college in a state where pot had been legalized. There are too many other options elsewhere. I lived in Hawaii for awhile, and I would not send any kid to UH from OOS, regardless of marijuana issues. Would only go there instate if that were all we could afford.
In fact, I also attended public HS in Hawaii while there, and it was the worst. Security guards hired by the school were selling pot to kids!! $5 a joint. I would do anything possible to send my children to private school in HI. Might not make a difference regarding access to pot, but the teachers and academics at the public HS I attended were also unfortunately weak.
I agree about the concern over the edibles. Scary that kids don’t really know what they’re ingesting.