<p>We really didn’t set any restrictions with DS#1 as to distance from home. He ended up a 7-hour car ride away. With DS#2, I’ve decided nobody needs to be a plane ride away, although he’s not looked at anything that far. I think something inside me thinks even if it’s a long day drive, I could get to my kid <relatively> quickly if anything happened.</relatively></p>
<p>While I do look at friends whose kids are local/within an hour or two and think “wouldn’t that be nice?”, DS#1 needed a push out the door, and I’m happy he’s not right down the street. He was always quite a homebody–didn’t particularly like family vacations over about a week, told people his goal for the summer after hs graduation was not to set foot outside our county. This has been really good for him. I’ve fallen into a nice (for me) routine of moving him out in August, visiting for parents weekend, visiting again once in the spring, and moving him home. (DH did move him out freshman year, but I don’t think will see campus again til graduation. Men.)</p>
<p>To the OP–for what it’s worth, I do believe our lives have a path. I know you wish you’d gotten more time with your daughter over the last four years, particularly now as the BIG separation looms. It’s obvious she made a great choice, though. Revel in that. And warm thoughts your way as you face this next wonderful milestone with your daughter.</p>
<p>Daughter is in Chicago, we’re in NY, the distance isn’t really a problem because there are at least 3 flights an hour most days, more if you’re flexible with airports. Prices aren’t bad either if you plan in advance. I don’t think I would want a school where there are two flights needed or a long drive (over 2 hours) from airport to campus.</p>
<p>What I find more difficult is the time difference. I won’t allow my younger daughter more than 1 time zone away because the time they seem to “need” to talk to you is always later in the evening as the day is winding down - around 10-11 their time which translates to 11-midnight my time. It doesn’t happen all that often but often enough as I’m too old to not get my “beauty sleep!”</p>
<p>D is in NYC, which is about 4 - 4 1/2 hours away. People always remark about how “far away” she is but it is only a little farther than one of the instate schools which is very popular here. I guess the out of state thing throws them. We have great (cheap!) bus service to/from NYC which is how she gets back & forth on breaks. Also, both S & I love to visit the city (H - not so much). </p>
<p>She seriously looked at a school in Chicago (would have applied except she did ED at the NYC school). Both H & I are from Illinois and have a lot of family/friends there and travel there every year, so that would not have been much of an issue for us.</p>
<p>We are in TX and DS#1 is in PA. We dropped him off in August for Band Camp and didn’t expect to see him until Thanksgiving. As it turned out, I had to fly him to New Orleans for his grandfather’s funeral in Sept - a sad occasion but it was nice to see him.</p>
<p>In addition to the cost of airfare and sometimes the difficulty of getting flights - make sure your child is prepared for travel “problems.” My son has already had to spend the night in an airport hotel (at the airline’s expense) due to mechanical problems, and another time just slept on the floor at the airport when weather delays canceled flights. </p>
<p>He has handled all this quite well - but I can’t say the same for DH!</p>
<p>It actually ended up being cheaper to send D to her private U on the East Coast than it was to attend the private U in our hometown. Luckily, we have lots of frequent flier miles and both our home town and college town are major cities with lots of direct flights. D is a musical theatre major so we often miss performances, which is disappointing, but we try to visit at least once a year. Do we miss her? Sure, but we also know that she is having a great experience that couldn’t be duplicated anywhere in our home state.</p>
<p>My son was just over two hours away for four years and it was really nice. He lived there year round because of work, so it was nice to be close enough to go over for the day. My daughter has wanted to go to up north for college since she was a freshman. She is going to school 1500 miles from home. The good news is that the flights between here and Boston are relatively inexpensive, frequent and non-stop, my criteria because I hate to fly. We have set a travel budget for her that allows her to come home for Thanksgiving, Christmas and one more freebie. If she is careful and books her flights early enough, she can get another roundtrip or two within her budget if she wants. She is an athlete also, so won’t be coming home for spring break. She is my youngest and I would have liked to have her closer to home, but I knew she would be miserable. I plan on visiting in the fall and again in the spring, but if she wants to see me in the winter, she will have to come home!</p>
<p>I will fine if my youngest decides to apply to a long distance school, but…my criteria will be that it is within an hour drive of a DIRECT flight and that there is reasonable airport to campus ground transportation available for students. A perfect example is WashU, he could take a direct flight and then a metro ride from the airport to a stop right at the campus.</p>
<p>Notrichenough – I’ll go you one better – my parents set foot on my campus ONCE – at graduation. Sure, there were parents weekends, but I knew they wouldn’t come, so I never told them about them. </p>
<p>I went up to school on my own. I’d seen them get flustered and angry and nervous when I’d accompanied them to bring my 2 brothers and older sister to college.</p>
<p>OP makes a very good point – factor in the cost of transportation with the fin aid and COA. I told D I’d rather have her near a big urban center (Boston, DC) where at least there are SEVERAL options to get home (bus, train, plane, ride from Mom).</p>
<p>No real choice for my son. The state U is 6+ hour drive. I did like the idea of direct flights, even if that meant driving farther to larger airports (LAX rather than Burbank). Even so, son delays booking flights so ends up wasting time with connections. Actually, I’ve been the lazy one this year and have not made a single trip north!</p>
<p>I would agree that the time zone difference can be problematic. I admit to having received a few 1 AM calls! I thought it would be an issue over winter break too, as far as D’s sleep schedule being too far off from ours. But since she decided to work, she had no choice but to adapt a litle. She was able to arrange a 10AM start time rather than 9 AM so she wouldn’t have to wake up so early West Coast time, and thus everything worked out fine.</p>
<p>One of her teammates had a health issue that required hospitalization. While her parents would have liked to have been there, the RA and other school staff were absolutely wonderful! I wouldn’t allow a child with serious medical problems to go that far to college, however. </p>
<p>Shipping her stuff out there was also so much easier than I had anticipated. I was really worrying for a while. D ended up being able to take a lot in her suitcases (free with her ticket) when she flew there for training camp, and the remainder we brought in ours when we came for move-in (also free), or purchased on site. Summer storage might be a stickier, more expensive problem.</p>
<p>In sum, I don’t think distance has to be a deal-breaker. It all depends on your priorities and individual situations, the personalities involved, as well as your level of tolerance for mild inconvenience.</p>
<p>I should clarify that we wouldn’t have agreed to our child going that far away to just any school. There would have to be something special that she couldn’t have matched closer to home. So when compiling her interest list, we identified 2 schools for which we felt a plane trip would be justified. One was THE top school for her sport (but we agreed the coach would have to seriously believe in her potential since the academics weren’t ideal), and the other was the best mixture of suitability as far as academics and athletics in her case.</p>
<p>I really don’t understand why, if you have one or more decent state schools which offer your child’s major, you’d want to pay OOS tuition and plane fare to attend another state’s flagship school. There would have to be some major extenuating circumstance before we’d agree to that scenario. Yet people do it.</p>
<p>Our state’s flagship does offer the rather unique program that my son wants, but it was never really an option. While he was accepted to many excellent ENGR schools and got into the honors college at his current school, he would not have been accepted at our flagship because he wasn’t in top 10%. In addition, he had no desire to stay in TX (it’s not home for us) and he wanted to be in the band but can’t stand the UT band uniforms! </p>
<p>My younger son will also be going OOS, but for him, the cost of his OOS tuition is not much higher than what we would be paying if he was in-state.</p>
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<p>We’re in CT and D1 has been in AZ for four years. It’s been a piece of cake! I flew out with him freshman year, bought all the stuff there and set him up. We’ll return in May for graduation. In between our family visited once during his sophomore year, during S2’s winter break (mostly to see the Grand Canyon!).</p>
<p>His transportation issues are also easy-peasy (as far as I’m concerned). I purchase plane tickets according to his schedule and he figures out how to get to the airport; he spends the whole day traveling, sometimes through 2 stops and 3 time zones. I arrange it so that he arrives at my convenience at the airport 10 minutes from my office. After graduation he’ll be moving to San Francisco, even farther away.</p>
<p>S2 is within a three hour drive, and similarly convenient. We did drive down to move him in last August. Since then he has returned home three times for breaks and holidays, and we’ve yet to return to campus. Like S1, I purchase an Amtrak ticket according to his schedule; he gets himself to the train station by local rail; I pick him up about 1/2 hour from home. We likely will drive down in April to pick-up his stuff in advance of finals, but he’ll be flying directly to his brother’s graduation and returning home by plane with us.</p>
<p>I’ve liked not being within easy reach of S1. When he wanted to buy a car, he figured it out himself. When he was arrested for MIP last year, he figured out the court process and paid his own fine. When he was injured playing rugby, he figured out how to navigate the out-patient health care system. And looking forward, we’re excited about visiting him when he’s settled on the west coast!</p>
<p>I think most people do it because of extenuating circumstances, including the elusive “fit.”</p>
<p>We live in Texas, our son was accepted to UT Austin yet he attends a lower ranked college in Massachusetts. There were several reasons why we agreed to this but one of them was that even with the airfare, the scholarship given to him by the private college he attends came out a bit cheaper than paying full fare and driving back and forth to UT. </p>
<p>Also, our son is gay. After college he wants to marry and have children. We wanted him to be in a state where that was possible.</p>
<p>From my pov, it is difficult. He’s in a few song/dance groups and we would love to see them perform. His school has a great hockey team and we would love to attend their games. But those are selfish reasons and so we let him go.</p>
<p>This is an interesting discussion. My D (only a HS junior) is looking at 5 schools. 4 of them are between 2.5 and 4.5 hours away from home, and the 5th is an 11 hour drive, or a 1.5 hour plane ride plus a 1 hour drive. Since DH and I don’t mind driving at all, and could do the 11 hour drive in a day, we haven’t given the distance much thought. I went to college 2 hours from home. My parents came to drop me off and pick me up, and I took a bus home for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Spring Break. I’m sure that would also be the case for any of my D’s choices. If she went much further than 12 hours, or went someplace that took multiple planes or was hours from an airport, it would be more limiting. It’s definitely something that needs to be considered before a child falls in love with a school that’s beyond the parent’s comfort or affordability zone in terms of distance.</p>
<p>Speaking from the student end of the perspective, there are definitely some challenges to going to school farther away. You spend more on dorm room set up as a freshman because you can’t bring very much from home, and yes, you occasionally get sad that other kids can go home for short vacations (Fall break, Thanksgiving, Easter, etc) and you can’t be with your family during those times. There’s the homesickness, and then God forbid if there’s an emergency it can be difficult. </p>
<p>BUT for me, the pluses FAR out-weighed the minuses, and I think for my parents as well. We’re really close, but they told me that they didn’t raise me to be hardworking, independent, and curious so that I could stay at home with them and knit. They wanted me to explore the world and do what I wanted with my life, so they were encouraging, even though we missed each other. It was hard sometimes, but I also learned to be a lot more independent than my friends. I packed myself up at the end of the year, and moved myself in at the start. I formed really close friendships because I had to turn my schoolmates into my surrogate families, and I had wonderful Thanksgivings at the homes of local friends whose parents became like my second parents. </p>
<p>And all in all, it was good preparation. I didn’t move closer to my parents after graduation, but after 4 years on opposite ends of the country, we’ve learned how to stay close despite the distance. I’m used to starting fresh in a new place now, and comfortable making new friends and carving out my own space even if the surroundings are somewhat unfamiliar.</p>
<p>It was very convenient having S 45 minutes away–it was no problem moving him in or picking him up for breaks. Then DH and I retired and moved out of state, and now it’s a 3 1/2 hour drive or a 5 hour bus ride. We moved in October, so we haven’t experienced moving him in or out of the dorm yet. Unfortunately, S broke his glasses Monday night and then realized that we had his only backup glasses. Instead of being able to drive the glasses down to him, I had to send them by UPS and they didn’t get there until Wednesday morning. Ever try to sit through classes in French and accounting when you have to hold the book two inches from your face? :eek:</p>
<p>“I really don’t understand why, if you have one or more decent state schools which offer your child’s major, you’d want to pay OOS tuition and plane fare”</p>
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