Most who head south go there because they want to be there. Some go to better schools than their parents went to up north and some don’t.
S1 told me that he’d go anywhere but South. Mainly it’s that he can’t stand the heat, but it’s partially cultural, for him.
At his age I would’ve gone to Tahiti U.
^^^ What’s the heat? Many South colleges start their school year earlier than the North (around third week of August) and don’t celebrate many Federal holidays (except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and King’s birthday), so the school year basically ends before May. A month and half between Mid August and start of October of heat in exchange of rest of year in good weather (mild weather in winter) looks like a good bargain to me.
My kid is leaning South because it is warm and he wants to experience a new part of the country. We can still drive there too.
My daughter is from NJ and she is attending Rice so she is an example of this. It is universally true that there is a slight advantage to admission applying out of region then in region because schools are looking for diversity including geographic diversity. One would have this advantage applying to elite north east universities if coming from Wyoming or South Dakota .
But also I pushed my daughter to look at some southern schools because of weather. She was planing to attend a new England school but I know she really doesn’t like the cold. This ended up being such the right decision. The girl one slot above her in high school went to Cornell and freshman year my daughter became so happy that she wasn’t in Ithaca in February.
College is attended in the fall and the winter and having the whole campus opened up year round is a benefit that can’t be overstated. It builds community and interconnections. Students, faculty, staff, and community are much more likely to interact if they are not hunkered down inside. At least this is what I have witnessed at Rice then my ala matar in Philadelphia.
@57special unless the student is going to summer school, the student pretty much escapes the heat for nearly all of the school year (except the first week or so). Southern weather is awesome from Sept to May…sunny blue skies with puffy white clouds.
As for the “culture”…colleges are colleges…filled with kids who are right, left, middle and everything in between. Profs tend to be liberal…
@robotrainbow: Rice is indeed a great school. My SoCal-raised daughter has had a wonderful experience there. She even loves the Gulf Coast humidity that others complain about, along with the lush green foliage which comes with that humid climate. I would guess that there is more chlorophyll on the Rice campus than there is in all of Orange County!
She actually turned down Cornell for Rice. A visit to Ithaca in “spring” was a major factor in her decision. 
There are lots of old myths about south and people often ignorantly judge whole region as a monolithic entity. Its sad yet funny because schools and colleges of metro areas of whole country are now culturally very similar to each other. Heat issue is another moot point as colleges are off during summers and open during winter so bad winters of east are a bigger nuisance then summers of south.
This thread turned more towards money and state schools but I was asking about top southern schools like Duke, Rice, Vandy who are as good or better than most higher ranking eastern counterparts but don’t have as much name recognition or movie references for common people to know their worth.
@CupCakeMuffins Both my kids looked to the South for college. We are outside Philadelphia and some of the schools that I think get overlooked include Furman, Wofford, Rhodes and Sewanee for liberal arts. I would include Washington & Lee and Davidson, to a lesser degree.
My son also looked at SMU & TCU - 2 more great private options that don’t get a lot of attention around here.
Duke & Vandy, on the other hand, get plenty of applicants from our public school.
Indeed. Texas privates need to market aggressively.
We live in NJ. My S is at Emory. If you asked me at the beginning of his senior year where he would end up, Emory would have been far down the list. And yet there he is. He turned down UMich among others to go there. It was the only southern school he applied to and weather was a factor. At least 2 kids from his graduating class are at Georgia Tech, and 1 at Clemson. My oldest graduated HS in 2011. I remember one kid going to Alabama. The overwhelming majority still choose schools in the Boston-Washington corridor. But schools like Maryland and Delaware don’t seem to be as popular as they once were. So yes I see a small but a growing number of kids heading south.
Not everyone shares this assumption that the south has “better” weather. 
I tried to get my kid to consider Rice–and maybe UVa and W&M, although I don’t know how the finances would have worked out there, since he needed a virtual full ride–but he adamantly refused to look at any southern schools.
My eldest specifically preferred a southern school-she correctly believed that her campus would be more polite, friendly, and pleasant, with a higher quality of life than schools elsewhere. More modern dorms and much more innovative teaching were a big draw, too, as can occur with younger less tradition bound schools. She wanted a more pre-professional and less political vibe, which was easier to find in southern schools.
U.S. News provides a graphic of where its highly ranked colleges land on a map: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2018-09-11/where-to-find-the-2019-us-news-best-colleges.
That map truly is northeast and mid-Atlantic heavy! Thanks, @merc81
Oh yes, if it is rank you seek, the northeast, and a few places in England, and several in China and a few in Europe will be your best bets for the top of the world university rankings. Along with large public schools like U of Washington, U of Texas, many of tithe U of California schools-and none of the liberal arts colleges, which many find appealing for other reasons.
I guess the question of “good weather” is all relative. If you are coming from Boston, sure Houston sounds great but if you are coming from the west coast, CA for example, Houston is brutal with high heat and humidity in April/May and August/Sept when college is in sessions. In addition, it rains a lot in the south with thunderstorms popping up all the time, out of the blue. The south and southeast weather is not perfect by most people’s stnsdards.
As someone said, as NE colleges become less and less affordable, many kids/families are chasing the big merit in the south and better acceptance rates.
Every area has their own natural hazards, it can vary from hurricane to tornado, heat to freeze, blizzard to earth quack but no place has truly perfect conditions.