<p>D is a rising junior putting together a list of potential schools. After we visited Hawaii when she was about 7, I jokingly put a bug in her mind to think about going to UH for college. She wants to leave our city, and would like to at least put UH on her maybe list. H has said no way because of the cost and distance to get her home. I think he should chill and let her come up with the list.</p>
<p>Any similar experiences? Solutions?</p>
<p>To me the big negative seems to be that most of the scholarships seem to go to residents.</p>
<p>I once came home from a trip to San Jose, Ca. and booked a flight to Hawaii for the upcoming weekend and the roundtrip flight from San Diego to Hawaii was less than the flight I just took from San Diego to San Jose! I’m not saying it was typical but depending on where you live the flight to Hawaii may not be much worse than, for example, a flight from California to NY. </p>
<p>Get typical prices so you can quantify it and then ask whether you’d be willing to do that within the continent if the costs were similar and if so, then why not Hawaii? Lots of parents here on CC and elsewhere have their kids attending college on the other side of the country but of course, there definitely is some cost hit to doing so.</p>
<p>The problem I see is that if your kid wants to get a job out of college, most companies will probably not recruit in Hawaii. There are enough colleges in California to recruit from.</p>
<p>But other than that, I have no problem with your kid going to Hawaii. However, I think it may be hard to get into if you are out of state.</p>
<p>Also, it is expensive to live there, because even a bottle of ketchup has to come in by sea.</p>
<p>If we lived on the West Coast I could see it, but it takes longer to get to Hawaii from where we live then does to get to Europe. Also, there was no reason to look out there, school reputation-wise. I think it’s fine to look for a school in a place that you would enjoy living, but it shouldn’t be a priority over program.</p>
<p>Read college guide write-ups about UH. It’s largely commuter and by the accounts that I’ve read, campus life takes a backseat to local attractions.</p>
<p>We live in CA, and over the years I’ve known 3 or 4 kids who for various reasons went away to college in Hawaii. Other than being expensive to live there and harder to come home for the holidays, it seemed to work out fine for them. Hawaii is closer to CA than the east coast is. And as for expense, it’s probably no worse than living in the Manhattan to attend Columbia or NYU.</p>
<p>Unless the student wants to study BFA Hawaiian Flower Arranging or some such major that you can’t find on the mainland, or a program where UH is ranked highly, I would agree with the concerned parent.</p>
<p>I am a Californian, but 40 years ago I went to UH for my freshman year of college. I had attended a fairly competitive high school in SoCal, and I found the academics at UH relatively weak. I came home after a year to transfer into UC Irivine.
I had fun at UH- met a lot of interesting people and tried some crazy things, but I couldn’t see myself taking my studies seriously in that environment. That’s just me, though. Even for a Californian, it was just too much like paradise, and there were too many distractions.
I still remember my time there fondly, however.</p>
<p>Maybe we should do student exchanges… My daughter just started college at an East Coast school and we are here in Hawaii. Plane fare is definitely expensive. I paid $560 one way for her in August and I’d be lucky if I can get round trip plane fare at around $800for her to come home for Christmas. We’re sending her to her uncle in North Carolina for Thanksgiving but I’m not sure what we’ll do with her for Spring Break.</p>
<p>I actually attended UH so if you have any questions about UH or Hawaii, feel free to ask.</p>
<p>This isn’t a battle I’d choose to fight with one of my kids. She only wants to put it on her “maybe” list and will very likely realize, as she narrows down schools according to priority (and budget, if one has been given to her), that HI is a great vacation destination but probably not the best educational option for her. My kids put all kinds of things on their maybe lists and the impractical ones dropped off fairly quickly. I’m sure they were good for daydreaming about in the meantime and they did get the kids thinking about what their real priorities are (luckily, beaches and sand were not on that list!).</p>
My daughter just started college at an East Coast school and we are here in Hawaii. Plane fare is definitely expensive. I paid $560 one way for her in August and I’d be lucky if I can get round trip plane fare at around $800for her to come home for Christmas. We’re sending her to her uncle in North Carolina for Thanksgiving but I’m not sure what we’ll do with her for Spring Break.</p>