Help/Suggestions Needed: College Decision.

So you are considering moving across the country so your daughter can commute to college? I would think it would make more sense for her to commute in CA.

@suzyQ7 Not exactly. We own a house in Metrowest that our kids grew up. After spending 5 years in CA, we are considering moving back. Whether she commutes or stays in a dorm, has nothing to do with us moving back to MA. Even if she chooses to go to UW or CPP, we would still be moving back to MA. Silicon Valley is no longer affordable or sustainable for us.

Update 4/14:

We were in Boston last week and visited the three campuses.

  1. UMass Amherst - fantastic campus and great experience. We will have to see if our D's name will be taken off the waitlist post May 15th. This is the ideal campus if she gets accepted.
  2. Suffolk University: We attended the Admitted Students Reception at Suffolk over the weekend. The entire day was well planned, organized and executed by the staff, students and alumni very well. We were impressed with the way they paid attention to detail and took time to answer all questions. There were 1400 students+family members that day and Suffolk did a great job in splitting them into smaller groups of 30-40 with a 15-20 minutes welcome address by the new President and Dean. They had academic fair in one floor where the dean/faculties of the majors were available to answer any questions from students/families. In another floor they had setup booths for multiple topics - financial aid, housing, clubs, etc. and had their staff meet and answer questions. Sure, they're private and they have to do this much to impress upon students/families. The tour to the few buildings and the housing was handled by current students. We walked in Boston Commons area and State House area to move from one building to another building.

While our experience with people that we met was overall positive, we felt the absence of a ‘campus’ setting in a big way. Students would be pretty much restricted to those couple of multi-storey buildings and may not have anything else to do outside their classrooms. This was concerning. Yes, it’s a downtown college and there is only so much real estate available. But somehow, I wasn’t comfortable walking from one of their buildings through the streets/boston common to the housing building - we had a ton of folks on the street smoking and spitting in that area which made us very uncomfortable and not so safe. I wondered how it would be after hours if our kid has a late evening class and had to walk through these aisles.

  1. CalPoly Pomona: Compared to Suffolk, CPP is far better with a true campus setting. Lot of positives, large housing and in the buzzing SoCal. LA is just about 30 miles away. CPP is well known for engineering majors, but not too bad for business as well, I presume. I'm trying to find someone who has experience / knowledge about their business major. Also they moved from a quarter system to a semester system recently it seems.

I asked my D and she said that she was not feeling safe in downtown Boston and was concerned about that area. She felt that she’ll have a better experience in CPP. She is inclined towards accepting CPP by / before May1st. She also wants to see if she is taken off the waitlist by UMass Amherst and if that happens, she’ll go there.

Thank you.

So glad you visited and got a good feel! Sounds like a good decision. If she gets off the UMASS waitless, she can decide then if she wants east vs west. If not, CPP is great. Congratulations