School Responsibilities

HoustonSaint68 said
Yeah, we're not in disagreement. I didn't mean provincialism in the pejorative sense of being bourgeois -- more like the parochialism of "why would you want to live anywhere else".

As I referenced, I think NOLA is much more welcoming and cosmopolitan in thought since Katrina but, particularly as a fellow non-Jesuit kid :hihi: , I was definitely projecting my own biases and desires when working with my kids on their college decisions.

Fair enough. I certainly see some advantages to kids going out of town for college but I think it kind of depends on the kid. Maybe I am projecting because I spent time in Baton Rouge and Gainesville and didn't really feel like I got much of anything life experience wise out of it. Although I guess that might have been different had I gone to the North East or the West Coast.

Still, as with your kids, I think if you get out of college debt free, it gives you a lot more options to travel and see the world since you won't have all that debt and you might be able to take a job that you love/like over a job that just pays more money. So, maybe part of it for me is that I see the debt free as more important than the experiences of college, since the debt I had pretty much so forced me to go to law school and pretty much so forced me to take the highest paying job I could get rather than maybe taking some that might have been more fun and interesting. I just tend to think missing those 4 years of great experiences (to the extent you can't also have great experiences closer to home) is less important than the effect being debt free out of college has on the rest of your life. I honestly know next to nothing about finances and have made a lot of financial mistakes in my life, so I can't really tell my kid how to do all that stuff, but I can make sure she gets done with school without a huge amount of debt.

But, sure, if you can afford it and the kid doesn't have to build up debt, then sure going far away can be a great experience. That being said, I had a lot of fun during my 3 1/2 years at U.N.O.