I’ve also been looking at these lately and they vary so widely. I’ve seen them as low as $1000 and as high as $5200 (I guess $100/wk for a yr?). The numbers from different schools are so different that I’ve just started ignoring them and figured about $2000, though I do think that is high. I would think that a lot of the expenses are those that she would have anywhere, even if she was living at home. You have to wash your clothes and brush your teeth no matter where you are. I also have been estimating travel myself rather than use their costs. You can price out airfare or trains to estimate what it will cost and then multiply by how many trips you expect.
GMTplus7, that’s a lot of visiting. My child is perfectly capable of packing her own things at the end of the year. She going back next week alone too. I visited her for spring break to see her play, and Thanksgiving she went home with a friend because it is too short a time period. If you want to spend $10,000 per year, that’s fine but certainly a school is not going to put an outlier figure like that in a COA for travel.
My daughter’s school uses $4200 for COA, but it is $1200 for books, $3000 for misc. Just a guess, with nice round numbers I think.
That amount of travel, however, is your choice, and is not typical for most students, even the ones that live in the US.
Keep those perspectives coming! I may not have asked it well but these exactly the kinds of things I wanted to hear. Thanks to all.
My D’s “other expenses” in the CoA increased only $150 (or 5%) from last year. I am sure her text book cost would be at least double of the last year and that alone would increase at least 20% of the “other expenses” from last year. So you know how accurate those estimates can be.
Schools S applied to were all on the East Coast but for one. We live in CA. All the estimates were just BS stabs in the dark that didn’t relate to our situation. So for travel expenses, I just created my own spreadsheet and assigned a O/W price per segment based upon whether the trip was nonstop to a major city or a connecting flight to a secondary market, then multiplied that by # of trips per year. That gave me a good idea of where we were going to stand at each school when the acceptances came in. For the one school in CA, I did mileage calcs and added a couple extra trips home, plus parking expense at school.
One thing I didn’t calculate per se, which GMT mentioned is the number of times that the parents go (or plan to go) and how many parents each time. We are spending quite a bit to get him there in the Fall (of course, it’s first one off to college, so we both have to go, and stay for the orientation). But figure in parents weekends, any other events you want to attend, and whether for whatever reason they need your help coming and going for any of the trips.
D’s school estimates $1200 books and supplies, $1000 travel, and $3000 personal expenses. First year we actually spent $800-900 books (engineering), $700 travel (just her airline tickets, to move in, come home for winter and spring break but not thanksgiving, and someone else paid her trip from school to her summer internship), and under $1000 personal expenses (she’s not a big spender!). However, DH and I both flew out for move in which involved hotel and car, I flew out once to visit, and we spent at least $400 at Target outfitting the dorm at move in (everything from mattress cover and lamp to medications and snacks). There was also a fair amount of shopping done ahead of time for winter clothes for a drastic climate difference between home and school.
A more local school estimated $1500 travel and $1800 misc. It was a 2 hour drive. We would not have come close to that amount of travel or personal expenses, especially since we could have brought most of the dorm supplies from home that we had to buy on location at the school she attended, and she wouldn’t have needed a new wardrobe.
It’s not hard to do your own calculations, but I think when we did this for ourselves, we failed to properly account for the first year “startup” costs. The rest of our own estimates were pretty close.
As an example for the above, I have now purchased all flights for the year - from CA to Northeast, the travel was $2,500 plus 75,000 airline miles. This includes all parental travel, hotel, car, etc. However, he will probably incur more exps getting to/from airport at school. This also only includes beginning, end, and winter break. Not Thanksgiving or Spring Break (he will be staying with relatives on the East Coast for Thanksgiving, and not sure what’s going on for SB yet).
As @Cameron121 alludes to, the cost of getting to and from the airport or train or bus station should be taken into account. My older daughter’s college is very close to an airport but the private transit services (i.e., not the college’s, which had limited hours and availability) charge $50 to $75 for one-way trips to and from the airport.
S’s school actually operates a free airport shuttle bus for a couple of days at the beginning of the fall term, beginning of winter break, beginning of spring term, and at the end of the year. Kind of nice, but if you leave/arrive other times you need to pay.
Us too. I figured those costs were the same )pr at least the same ballpark) no matter what school my kid chose. But we were able to do that because all schools were within driving distance. No major travel expenses involved.
I was also of the opinion if these costs make or break you, then you are probably cutting it too tight.
DS flied home also during these two breaks (Thanksgiving and Spring Break) during college. I think we must have spent several thousands a year. But we skipped all the parent weekends. We did flied to campus at the end of the spring semester though.
Yes, we spent a lot on the traveling cost during those 4 years.
It is a totally different situation after college. (In this year, I think he will again spend more on airfare.)
Another indirect cost to consider is storage cost. Is there somewhere on campus where students can store belongings over the summer? If not, and if the school isn’t within driving distance (or, as in our case, we simply didn’t want to haul all D’s things home and back again), the student will need to rent a storage unit over the summer. At the suggestion of another poster, I hired movers (cost $75) to move D’s things into storage. It was cheaper and more convenient than me making the trip (which would’ve included hotel) up and back to help D move her things.
When making your calculations, remember that motels increase their rates (sometimes to about double the usual rate) whenever a nearby college has move-in, move-out, graduation, or Parents’ Weekend. The price you paid on the random date when you visited the school is not the price you’re going to pay when you come along with the crowd.
I acknowledge our travel costs are on the high end of the spectrum, but it’s probably unremarkable for int’l students. I mention our costs to add perspective to this discussion.
Our >10k/yr travel cost per kid was for my kids as HS students in boarding school travelling internationally, and it includes parent travel costs + hotel, rental car, restaurant meals. The older one is starting college this fall, and we don’t expect to visit him so often at college. So his associated travel costs should come down.
Another thing to remember is that the further they are along in college the less they come hone. By junior yr. my kid stayed on campus during Oct. break & Feb break (his college had a different schedule than most) Also, a lot of parents stop going to Parents weekend.after freshman year.
Also, ditto what Marian said about hotel prices - especially if college is in a small city/town. The normal rate for hotel room we paid for random weekend was $100/night. Graduation weekend it was $385 and was pay in advance. We chose to stay 20 minutes away in another town and it was $125 cheaper per night and we didn’t have to pay in advance.
Travel is a huge variable not accounted for well in the total COA figures colleges give. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the travel figures they use more or less reflect the average travel costs of their student body. But it only stands to reason that most students will fall either below or above the average, in many cases by wide margins.
My D1 attended a very highly regarded LAC in suburban Philadelphia. Roughly 12% of the college’s entering class come from Pennsylvania, and I’d hazard a guess that a large majority of those come from the Philadelphia metro area. For those kids, travel costs are the price of a few public transit tickets and/or the cost of Mom or Dad doing a few drop-offs and pick-ups on a trip of well under an hour in each direction, if well timed, and in many cases much less. That is to say, negligible. Another 32% come from “other Mid-Atlantic states.” Assuming that’s basically New York to Virginia (heavily concentrated in the DC suburbs at the southern end), you’re looking at roughly a 2-hour car ride or the cost of a relatively inexpensive train or bus ticket, unless you choose premium train service. Again, cheap, cheap, cheap. Another 13% come from New England. Of these, probably a good many come from the southern and western parts of Connecticut that are basically suburban New York, so again, very low travel costs. Another large fraction come from greater Boston, a longer haul but still only 5 hours by car assuming favorable traffic, or 6 hours by Megabus. That’s well over half the class whose travel costs are likely to be well below the average for the college as a whole, or at least could be kept well below the average if that’s a priority.
At the other extreme are international students, for whom each round trip could easily be $1,000 or more if coming from Europe and substantially more if coming from other continents. Keeping total travel costs down, however, is the fact that almost no international students go home for (U.S.) Thanksgiving, which isn’t celebrated in their countries and is too brief a window for most international travel; many don’t go home for fall or spring breaks because costs are prohibitive; and some don’t even go home for winter break, between the fall and spring semesters. Some, however, travel within the U.S. to be with friends or extended family members during these periods; those costs will vary widely.
Costs will also vary among U.S. students from outside the Northeast. Some will have relatively painless and inexpensive connections to Philadelphia. We live in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, a few minutes drive from the MSP airport which is a Delta hub with non-stop service to Philadelphia. D1’s college was an easy public transit ride to the PHL airport, a hub for US Airways with non-stop service to MSP. That meant there was direct head-to-head competition between two major carriers, which kept airfares reasonable, often around $300 per r/t ticket. And waiting in the wings was Southwest which serves both cities, albeit with connecting flights; but that generally kept downward pressure on airfares (and we sometimes used southwest when that was the least cost option). If either our home or the college was not near a major airline hub, airfares would be higher and travel times longer. And even being someplace with hub-to-hub service is no guarantee of cheap airfares, Both MSP and Detroit (DTW) are Delta hubs, with frequent, non-stop service between the two; but because no other carrier elects to compete on that route, it often costs twice as much to fly to Detroit from here as it does to Philadelphia, although the flight to Philadelphia is about twice as long. And driving is generally not an option for us; it’s nearly 1,200 miles and 18 hours of driving time in each direction for us, which means not only gas, tolls, depreciation, maintenance, etc., but also hotel and restaurant bills on the road and massive investments of parental time. We did those trips in initially getting D1 to college and in helping her close down at the end of college; those costs were many multiples of the college’s estimated average travel costs.
Bottom line: don’t take the college’s word for it. Travel cost will be reflected somewhere in published COA, but usually not broken out as a separate line item; it will often appear as part of a broader category, like “books, supplies, travel, and personal expenses.” Assume your travel costs will not be average; in all probability, they’ll be higher or lower, often by a wide margin. It’s worth the time and effort to do your own estimate of travel costs, based on current airfares, travel times, other transportation options, expected frequency of travel, etc., as well as summer storage costs, shipping costs if not traveling by car, and any parental travel costs either at the outset for initial set-up or at the end for graduation and shut-down, and at whatever points in between you may elect to visit. Then compare these costs college-to-college. You may find this accounts for several thousand dollars per year difference in COA, not reflected in the colleges’ published COA estimates.