<p>A majority of kids “trapped” on campus without anything to do? sounds like a recipe for disaster. I agree with the chicken/egg analogy. You need to have the activities that draw the crowd. You (the college) needs to be relevant. And that has nothing to do with convenience (distance to home)</p>
<p>If proximity was the issue? Then the ideal school would be remotely located. But in this day of planes, trains and automobiles? no domestic school is out of reach - and if you’re going to a top 20 and full pay as 52% supposedly are? a few hundred bucks to get home isn’t going to stop you.</p>
<p>Where is that USNWR ranking of commuter/suitcase schools when you need it? :)<br>
It would be an interesting list.<br>
Look for large parking lots with student parking only signs and if they mention bus service home toward a “big city” on weekends, it might be an indication. I would not want to go to any of these type schools and that is why we changed our minds on several.</p>
<p>Forget some idealized “college experience” (or as Pizzagirl charmingly calls it, “the sleep-away experience”). For many kids, the most at-risk kids, getting them out of their home experience is an important precondition to success. And getting them to expand their social horizons, and to integrate themselves into a culture with a different set of possibilities, is an important function of college. Suitcase school situations impair that.</p>
<p>At the other end of the spectrum, the rich and privileged and those who imitate the rich and privileged (i.e., collectively, the New York Times readership) have long had a model of college that was based on Oxford and Cambridge, and on English boarding schools. Part of kids growing up and cutting the apron strings was going away to school and living with peers, not parents. Part of the idea was learning – by trial and error, and that includes error – to trust your own judgment and make your own decisions. And another part of the idea was that parent-child relationships are probably better served if the child makes most of his or her lesson-teaching errors well out of range of parental supervision. For them (us), the notion of kids living at home during or after college is apostasy, a dangerous descent into (gasp!) working-class values.</p>
<p>It’s no surprise that, as more and more people have gone to college, and college has lost its function as a marker of class status, the old upper-class norms are no longer the norms. I doubt that is changing any time soon.</p>
<p>Checking if a college is a commuter school/suitcase college is important when one is casting a wide net, and looking at schools not on the beaten path and that one doesn’t know about personally. It’s especially important to know this about a college when your kid is going there wihout knowing a lot of other kids there. </p>
<p>There is a local school that fits this profile, but for those whose kids attend it an commute or are from the area, it’s no big deal. Many of them have known each other from high school and they get together during off time and hang out. My son, in fact is a little envious of this, as he went away to a school where he knew hardly anyone. At the time this commuting or locally dorming optin was not attractive to him but now when he hangs out with these kids that he has known for a while, when he comes home, he realizes there is a camaraderie here. But for someone who came to this college from out of town, it would not seem so friendly.</p>
<p>My parents told me I could not come before Thanksgiving and I don’t want my kid to either. Call me old fashioned. What other parents/kids want to do is fine with me.</p>
<p>Want to throw this out there. Look around this forum at this time of year and see all the threads about kids failing their first semester at a college far from home and parents looking for advice since their kids don’t appear ready for this kid of college experience. Maybe these kids would have succeeded their first semester if they had been at a suitcase college near their home and had come home many weekends (for whatever - socializing, laundry). Suitcase colleges may fill the gap between community college and the long distance school for kids who are not quite ready to live independently.</p>
<p>As a commuter at a non-commuter school (I don’t consider it a suitcase school, either), this article really caught my attention. </p>
<p>I’m far away from campus, but I’m not adverse to going down there if there’s something I want to do on the weekend. Problem is, USC doesn’t have so much weekend programming. They have a lot of things that don’t really interest me (read: parties), so I pretty much don’t do the “campus thing” on weekends (unless I have work to do down on campus). </p>
<p>And, FWIW, I don’t really have friends left in my hometown. My friends all go to their own schools in other areas and don’t come home unless they have a break. My sister is going to college next year (where, I don’t know yet). Those friends we share (her friends who’ve become my friends) will also be going to college. There’s no social reason why anyone would come back to my hometown on the weekends. If social factors mattered, I’d be living on campus.</p>
<p>I think suitcase schools are probably a great option for some kids, as kiddie describes. The article by OP does suggest that some of these schools are not happy with the designation, though. </p>
<p>That said, I’d love to see data in the various college guides (Fiske, etc) in response to a question like “How many weekends did you travel home during the last academic year (not including week(s) long college breaks, Thanksgiving, or reading periods)?”</p>
<p>Both my kids attended (different) instate public u’s. with 85% instate kids. They were three and four hours from home. They very rarely came home for a weekend…just school breaks. Their friends/social lives were at their universities. No reason to come home. Each kid had three roommates who didn’t go home either.</p>
<p>At universities with over 30,000 students there was always somebody to hang out with. Both moved off campus after freshman year to old neighborhoods just a couple of blocks from their campuses. We called them the “student ghettos” because there were blocks and blocks of old rundown rental houses full of students. There was always something going on in the neighborhood and then there was… football season…a major highlight of their college experiences.</p>
<p>Not all kids mature at the same rate, and the ability to come home on the weekends may be a godsend for some kids. It may allow certain kids (ones who would otherwise commute) have at least part of the “sleep away” experience. And coming home once in a while may provide an introvert the necessary space to recharge, which in turn may allow him/her to be more actively involved with the social scene when he/she returns. </p>
<p>From the perspective of the kid coming home, I don’t see it as a big deal one way or another. I could see how the ones left on campus might not like being at a place that clears out over the weekend.</p>
<p>Victoriaheidi, you mentioned USC . . . I don’t think the parents who insist that their kids stay “on campus” on the weekends mean literally “on campus.” I think most parents would want their kids to partake in the rich cultural and natural opportunities of the community that they live in generally, exploring neighborhoods, museums and galleries, inexpensive ethnic restaurants (if affordable), performing arts events (especially if student tickets are available), as well as outdoor activities, etc. That’s what I would want for my kid (but I wouldn’t try to engineer it)! I would consider that staying “on campus,” even if the kid didn’t participate in a single college-sponsored or college-centered social activity on the weekend.</p>
<p>Not sure this was necessarily synonymous with working-class values or the opposite with upper/upper-middle class values. </p>
<p>Not that long ago, working-class men along with many other men had their equivalent of going away…albeit not always by choice. </p>
<p>That was the military draft before 1973 or voluntarily enlisting in the armed forces. Many from the WWII, silent, and boomer generations loved to bring the draft up out of the blue to tell us Gen Xers/millennial males how “easy” we have it compared to them. </p>
<p>Conversely, there were plenty of upper/upper-middle class families in the past who confined their daughters to living at home until they were married due to the gender and social notions they held.</p>
<p>Almost everyone would prefer this, but not everyone has the privilege of obtaining this experience. I doubt there is a single person out there who chooses a local college because they PREFER a school that does NOT have a national draw. Some may COMPROMISE on this point in choosing a local school; many probably don’t have the opportunity to go to the very few schools in the country with a truly national draw. But if your kid happens to go to a school with a national draw in your own backyard, I don’t see the big deal with letting the kid come home on the weekend if he/she wants to.</p>
<p>Very true, and my friends and I do stuff like that on the weekends–we go to museums and shows; we see sporting events as a group; we’ve been to some concerts (even classical!)…we just don’t hang out on campus. But we happen to live in an area where there’s a ton of that stuff. I’m not sure so many students have the big-city opportunities we do.</p>
<p>I completely disagree that “almost everyone would prefer a school with a national draw.” The majority of college students choose schools precisely because they are close to home, they plan on staying in that area the rest of their lives, their friends go there (including high school friends they intend to stay close with) and they are just not all that interested in exploring some other part of the country. I completely disagree that your average college student sees a heavily-local school as some kind of negative that they might just not have a lot of choice about. I think you are forgetting about the multitudes out there, for whom East Directional State U serves them just fine in life.</p>
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<p>My kid goes to a school w/ a national draw that IS in my backyard. If there were an occasional situation where he needed a break and wanted to come home for a weekend, I wouldn’t consider that a huge deal - but I’d want to feel assured that it was coming from a position of “I’m generally happy at school but want to come home and see the dog,” rather than a position of “I’m lonely and if I go home, I’ll be less lonely.”</p>
<p>Some folks value close family ties and prioritize those relationships over other factors in choosing their college. There is nothing wrong with that, if that’s what the kid wants.</p>
<p>D attended an out of state private and I anticipate that S (HS junior) will also go out of state. Both of mine want(ed) the experience of living in another area. There is no “right” or “wrong” on this, but I don’t necessarily feel that going farther away to school indicated that a student does not value his/her family.</p>
<p>I attended a private college that was only about an hour away from my home and I almost never went home. I have great parents and was lucky to have a close family, but school was just a lot more fun. My parents encouraged this. OTOH, many of my HS friends attended a state school which was also about an hour away and ran home almost every weekend. I did not want that especially after starting my college experience at the local cc (a great experience BTW). I really wanted to get out of my comfort zone and never regretted my choice.</p>
<p>I was actually surprised somewhat by the large numbers of folks here on CC who are in favor of keeping their kids home by having them attend college within commuting distance and who find it odd others wanted to attend at away from home…even across the country. </p>
<p>Part of that was because most NYC area kids I knew growing up…especially those at my urban public magnet were of the completely opposite mindset. </p>
<p>The prevailing idea was going away for college is good and staying in the NYC area was heavily stigmatized with the notable exception of Columbia which “strongly encouraged” undergrads to spend the first year on campus at the time we were applying to college in the mid-'90s. </p>
<p>Commuting was viewed as turning what was supposed to be a college experience into a continuation of HS grades 13-16. The fact many overprotective parents of HS classmates tried to force this on their late teens/young adults added to that negative perception.</p>