Never occurred to me to put geographic limits on college selection. I didn’t have any 40 years ago and wouldn’t dream of putting them on my kids. At many renowned universities, relatively few students are local/regional. I like that.
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I had a bad breakup in college and the last people I would have wanted on my doorstep is my parents. That’s what my friends were for. I only went to school 45 minutes from home and didn’t even tell my parents we broke up till after the semester ended. I was close to home but rarely ever came home so it seemed like I was further away. However, I realized after I graduated that my college was a bit of an extension of HS. It was not a state school but the majority of the kids were from the northeast. I wished I had gone further away to meet different types of kids and experienced another part of the country. The job market was horrible when I graduated so I ended up living at home for a couple years.
For my kids, I want them to go out and experience life. My D had a couple traumatic incidents in HS as well as some mental health issues but she is now 1000 miles away as a freshman and is thriving. She has definitely had some rough patches and had she been closer to home, she would have come home for our support and to see her friends, many of whom are home due to covid. Being far away has forced her to find new friends to rely on and she has met so many people with perspectives different than hers (she is a liberal going to school in the south). It has really opened her eyes. When she came home for Easter, I couldn’t believe the changes in maturity. She was certainly not perfect, but her attitude had done a complete 180. We had a tumultuous relationship when she was in HS and being far away has really improved it. She facetimes me all the time now just to chat. She does have a couple older grandfathers she may not be able to see on their deathbeds but when she is home, she makes sure to spend a lot of quality time with them. Same with her younger brothers. She seems to really appreciate them now and if she was a lot closer and coming home all the time, I don’t think they would be as close as they are now.
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To be fair, had a similar relationship with our 24 year old, who went to college 45 minutes away. She came home a completely different person to, and rarely came home besides holidays, a huge difference in her relationship with her younger siblings, same with our 22 year son (1 1/2 hours away). I wasn’t surprised, my mom told me how different a person I was the first time she picked me up from college (hour away). I think they all come back changed, but for the better, it’s just a different relationship. Even our 20 year old, who was the easiest kid ever to raise, is more mature now.
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My parents lived in Africa while I was in high school and college and I took a gap year in France. I’ve been flying, taking trains etc on my own since I was 15, so I am always surprised at how fearful many Americans are.
The one thing I didn’t see mentioned specifically is that the early 20s are often a time that a seemingly perfectly healthy kid can develop schizophrenia or other mental illnesses. I’ve known several families that happened to. I also know of one case where I think being only 1.5 hours away allowed the parents to be way too helicoptery just as they were in high school. It did not turn out well.
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My son is an international student attending a US university. When we did college search we had our few criteria. One of them is we could drive 8 or 10 hours to reach him just in case of any emergency. I always prefer driving rather than flying. Believe it or not, the four of us in the family always take two different airplanes when traveling.
Do you drive separate cars, since deaths per passenger mile in cars are hundreds of times higher than deaths per passenger mile in scheduled commercial airline flights?
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No we don’t drive separate cars. The mindset is we trust our own driving skills. It is like taking the power of life into our own hands, not others. Also if disaster happened, taking airplane would wipe out whole family.
When you drive on the road, you are subject to the driving skills and vehicle maintenance habits of all of the other drivers of vehicles near you.
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I think that many people have mentioned the issue of mental health crises in general, although not a specific mental health issue, such as mania, severe depression, schizophrenic break. But absolutely, there is this concern. I would, however, say that most parents have a pretty good idea of the stability of their child’s mental health, by the time that they are applying to college. Most people who wind up with severe mental health issues in their late teens and early twenties showed some warning signs of it by the time that they were seventeen.
This happened with an in-law. Several times, with the same child, parents were unaware until the child was suicidal, in BIG trouble, had dug a horrible hole in every possible way for themselves. Tremendous family resources were directed towards trying to help that child. I don’t know if the outcome would have been any different had that child not been thousands of miles away.
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I don’t think of my kid as super worldly at all, but on a college trip overseas, the other kids were amazed that my kid knew how to read a map (a real paper map), figured out the subway system in about 8 seconds flat, and could get the group pretty much anywhere they wanted to go! 
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Really great skills to have. My D is getting very confident with navigating the NYC subways and feels she could get anywhere in the city easily now. So important!
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“Four years of travel to West Lafayette and we’ve been delayed more than 30 minutes once. For the US road network, I’d say this is probably par for the course.”
CA is totally different than going from a city in the east to the midwest which I have done a few times. You have to plan especially if you’re going between NoCal and SoCal, 4.5 hours is not 4.5 hours.
“(Is it a smokescreen for cost of travel concerns?)”
I don’t think it’s a smokescreen, affordability is the biggest factor is in choosing where kids apply or attend college, people don’t typically hide that.
Exactly! Most people who go to college in this country don’t “go away” and affordability is the main reason. It has nothing to do with being worldly or independent.
I didn’t have any geographical parameters 40 years ago either, BUT we knew what my parents could and could not help pay for. It was the same for H and my kids as well.
I agree that affordability is a major factor in college choice (including whether or not to attend at all). But I posted the question because never once from all the many parents I’ve heard who place geographical limits has cost of travel been indicated as a reason. It’s - literally - always “in case something happens” they want to be close(r).
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I think some kids just like to be closer and go home a lot. Personal choice.
Can ‘something’ go wrong? Yes, and probably will. Will the parents NEED to be close enough to get to the student in an hour or five hours? Probably the bad thing will happen anyway and everyone will deal with it.
If a student goes farther away to school, the student will most likely miss some things at home, like a cousin’s wedding or grandma’s birthday. My daughter’s school had a very short Thanksgiving break so many students didn’t travel (parents could always go to the student!) but if we’d lived within 2-3 hours she could have traveled home. To us, not a big deal. To others, it may be a deal breaker. In a weird twist, her boyfriend’s family has moved to the area where they went to college, so they now travel to that area for Thanksgiving. This year they are also going to a wedding there so will stay for 10 days.
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My parents put limitations on us in case something happened and also because they couldn’t afford plane tickets to fly us to or from college.
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Even if you got a full ride that would have made the plane tickets cheaper than what you would have to pay at a closer college?
To be fair, you posted a question about what is the “in case something happens” event, so the initial feedback you got here is going to be mostly about that “something”, not about other reasons they might want to limit distance. If all you’ve been hearing prior to that is from people you know personally, it’s quite possible they didn’t want to get into their finances in a casual discussion about their kids’ college search.
I went to college in the 80s and the school I went to was very cheap. Plus, although I was a smart kid and a good athlete, I wasn’t going to be offered any free rides anywhere. I can only say what our parents told us, that we needed to be relatively close for safety and financial reasons. So, my parents let us know it was at least partly a money issue. I don’t know if they would have told their friends about the money aspect if asked.