<p>Son chose UIUC (Urbana Champaign) OOS over Hopkins and WUSTL. The scholarship brought UIUC to our (Indiana) in state cost. After 2 trips home, H said “let him bring his car”.</p>
<p>D had many options, but chose a school in TX because it had all she wanted and more. She is diabetic and the athletic staff has been amazing getting her to any appointments she needed for those periodic tests. This year she has a car. We have always been close, and it’s been hard for me not to see her play. Even though it costs to fly her/us, the scholarships more than cover the difference in $$$ had she chosen another. Skype is also our friend.</p>
<p>Part of the COA is transportation. We’ve budgeted 4 (DD) and 5 (DS) round trips by air from locations about 800-1000 miles away which costs $1200 to $1500 each. But since we subsumed those costs within the COA it’s not an “extra” expense. </p>
<p>If we want to go there to visit them (10-12 hours driving) that’s more expense, but we turn those events into mini-vacations for us.</p>
<p>This all works for us, and although we miss seeing each of them more we have the benefit of no easy trips home when drama (either personal or with SOs) starts; they need to stay where they are and deal with whatever It is.</p>
<p>S1 and S2 are both 8-9 hour drives from home. Both also go to school in cities served by Southwest. Non-stop, cheap, < 2 hour flight, easy public transit to campus. We could be at school if needed in four hours. It would take us that long to drive from our house in Maryland to W&M. Heck, it can take an hour to drive the 22 miles from here to UMD, given DC traffic. We did a weekend trip to Boston in December for our anniversary and spent some time with S2. DH is flying to Chicago Sunday for work and will take S1 out to dinner. </p>
<p>I just booked S2’s flight home for Spring Break – $41 each way.</p>
<p>The issue isn’t the distance, it’s the ability to get home or to campus easily and/or in a reasonable time frame. For example, there is no easy way to get in or out of Ithaca.</p>
<p>My dad never visited my college campus. My mom dropped me off once. After that it was Southeastern Stages, or riding with friend or BF.</p>
<p>Being far away is made immeasurably more bearable by videophone (skype, iChat). To me, if you can see your child in the flesh and talk, it makes a huge difference. Aside from the hug and kiss, it is like being in the same room.</p>
<p>D is too far away to drive to see. But, a plane ride away, and her city and ours are hubs for the same airline. The planes fly back and forth every single day like a bus schedule. I like to skype once a week and we chat on the phone daily, sometimes for a long time, between classes :rolleyes: Less on the weekends. One of us has gone out to see her mid-quarter every quarter, to feed her and just give her a break from being “on.” This is getting more and more challenging, however, as she is so involved and so busy, she barely has time to have dinner with us, anymore. Though she makes it work, I don’t know how much longer she will want to. </p>
<p>It has been good for “us all” that she went so far away. We are a very close family, no less so now, but it is good for her to have her own world and space to grow up. As much as I originally wished she’d gone closer to home, she has become such an independent young woman, I really can’t regret the choice, at all.</p>
<p>Difficulty getting to a school will come into play when making our decision, distance will not. One school S is interested in is 11 hours by car, but doesn’t have frequent inexpensive plane service from nearby airports. If S is going to go away to school I don’t want it to be too difficult to get to the school from the airport.</p>
<p>S is a junior at a OOS university on the opposite coast. We went with him to drop him off freshman year, DH has visited him twice (once on parents weekend and another time when he was there on business), and all of us visited him for a weekend last summer. I don’t expect we’ll go back there again until graduation. Fortunately, his school is located within a bus/subway ride to a convenient and major airport.</p>
<p>My high school senior D has applied to a dozen schools around the country. One is within driving distance, but it’s her dead-last choice. Some are near an airport, and some are not. I have serious reservations about the ones that are not, because I believe it will create a huge logistical problem, but we’ll cross that bridge on April 1st when all the acceptances are in. It may turn out to be a non-issue.</p>
<p>Kids are each so different and so are families, or even the same family at different times. D1 wanted to be near us and ended up about a 45 minute drive away. I had lunch with her at various times and she sometimes joined us on Sundays for church. It was great. When she graduated and started looking for a job she focused her search within about 200 miles of home and is happily doing well about an hour away. D2, on the other hand, wanted out. And away. And somewhere cold (we live in the southwest). She’s been 3000 miles away. Last Christmas was the first time she had to change planes, otherwise we’ve found direct flights at no greater rate. She has come home for Christmas, Spring break, and at least part of summer so far and one of us has visited her once each fall. Yes, she’s homesick sometimes and sometimes wishes we could come to her meets, but overall it’s been good for her and for us.</p>
<p>I went 1500 miles away and only had a pay phone at the end of the hall to stay in touch. Now we’ve got cell phones, texting, email, skype, contact is no big deal. </p>
<p>Oh, and it is much cheaper for her to go to her distant private college with great financial aid than it would have been to go to one of the UC campuses. Even with the transportation costs.</p>
<p>Glad to have you help me sort out the problem. It’s not distance, it’s difficulty.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to say that my daughter thinks she should have stayed closer - far from it. She has thrived where she chose to be planted.
My complaint about location is purely from our angle.
We just get a little nostalgic as graduation grows closer…
Wait, our kids are all grown? What? How did this happen? What did we miss in the last blur of time passing?</p>
<p>My kids have chosen schools 600 and 900 miles away. The worst aspect of that has been when they’ve gotten sick or hurt. It’s very hard not to be able to help when your kid is sick enough to spend time in the infirmary on IV antibiotics, or can’t do laundry for two weeks because she’s on crutches and she’s already asked her friends for more important favors. And don’t get me started on the dental emergencies! It took me two kids to figure out that these were inevitable too and get our ducks in a row for when they occurred.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I’m pleased with how things have worked out with the kids so far away. Though it’s a 10 hour drive to W&M from here and neither kid has ever done the trip by air in less time.</p>
<p>I think distance is an important factor if the student is at all hesitant about how he/she will handle being a long trip from home.</p>
<p>My older daughter is two hours away by car or train. That has been ideal. She has enjoyed the opportunity to explore a new city, but likes the option of coming home for an occasional weekend. We usually drived up for a short day visit once a semester. She made friends easily and loves her school, but still likes being close to home.</p>
<p>My younger daughter is going farther away, but will have good direct flight options. She will also be able to come home for a weekend, and we can visit her a few times during the year.</p>
<p>If possible, please budget for at least one visit for fall of freshman year before Thanksgiving. (It can either be for the kid to come home, or a parent to visit the kid). In my experience, even the most independent kids need to touch base during those hectic first few months away.</p>
<p>We offered both kids the chance to come home on our dime during the first semester/quarter. They both appreciated having that “out” but neither took us up on it.</p>
<p>I was encourage to schedule that fall visit last year when S was a Freshman but when it came down to it he was busy and really didn’t seem to be needing us. I’m sure its a good idea to have it in mind though. I’m sure its great to have kids close but when we looked at the big picture for S away seemed like the better choice. If you happen to be a freshman parent reading this thread and you think your child might go to school flying distance away I would suggest starting to accumulate the frequent flyer miles, ours are from our credit cards. That has helped lots both for our visits and bringing him home.To be clear if all things were equal I’d pick the closer school every time. At the moment though we have no regrets.</p>
<p>When we looked at schools for DD, we wanted something that was about a two-hour drive OR near an airport where Southwest flew because Baltimore is a hub. She is about 4.5 hours away, but a one-hour flight that can be pretty cheap. She doesn’t come home much only because she is much happier at school and has more friends there.</p>
<p>DS, a high school junior, is looking much closer to home. He will come home more often, too, I suspect.</p>
<p>My son who is a one hour flight/seven hour drive is moving even further away to the opposite coast! But either way at least it’s a direct flight. </p>
<p>Younger son’s college is about a four hour drive from us, but about an hour from both my brothers and my mother. Even closer to various cousins and aunts, so in an emergency he would be well taken care of. </p>
<p>We went to parent’s weekend for the younger son partly because I wanted to check up on my Mom. We didn’t see much of him, but did meet the guy who runs the time-sink course he is taking. Very charismatic guy. </p>
<p>Older son really has no close friends from high school, but younger son still keeps in touch with his friends and I expect he will for a long time. There’s a decent chance he could end up in the area after graduation. Though he could also end up overseas given his interests.</p>
<p>dragonmom and all repliers: thanks for getting me to think ahead through your experiences. Next fall D will be over 2000 miles and two time zones away. Hadn’t thought about middle of the night phone calls! We may need to give more thought to how often she/we travel each way, before we find ourselves wishing it had been more. But anything will be an improvement on her spending this year on another continent!</p>
<p>I have twins, one who is going about 45 minutes away from our house and one who is going about 1000 miles away. The one who is closer (S) – yes, the logistics will be easier in terms of moving, picking him up to come home for Thanksgiving, etc., but in some ways it is going to be much harder for me emotionally because when I’m at my office, I’m only about 20 minutes away and it’s going to kill me that he’s 20 minutes away and I can’t do anything about it, because I promised (and I will stick to that promise) that just because he’s physically nearby, we are not going to hover or show up on campus.</p>
<p>Maybe because I travel on business, I don’t get worked up about travel inconveniences, though. I wouldn’t insist on only being a certain distance from home, or only attending in a metro area that has an airport. My kids looked at and liked several colleges that would be particularly inconvenient (Grinnell is a 4 hour drive and there is no getting around it; Kenyon is about a 6 hour drive and it’s not worth it to go to Columbus and fly out of there). Oh well. Life’s too short to get worked up about that kind of thing. I wouldn’t not go to (say) Australia if I had the chance because it’s a long flight.</p>
<p>Our daughter is on the opposite coast from us, and it has worked out very well. One thing I really appreciate is that her school has the whole week off for Thanksgiving. She can fly home the weekend before when the airfares are still regular-price, and we’re only paying the super-expensive fares for her return on Sunday.</p>
<p>We do try to find SWA flights in the winter with layovers in Las Vegas, rather than Chicago or Baltimore, just to reduce the chance of her having weather-related delays.</p>
<p>We love the time difference, because we are on the west coast, 3 hours earlier than our daughter. She calls us sometimes before she goes to bed (1 or 2 AM) and reaches us right before our usual bed-time of 10 or 11PM. On a Sat or Sun AM I can call her at 9:00 AM and know that I’m not waking her up, cause it’s noon.</p>
<p>She is very comfortable traveling, changing planes, and getting the shuttle to the campus. She is at a school where most of the students are doing the same thing, and it doesn’t seem like a big deal.</p>