Adrian_Thompson said:If you live in any kind of large metropolitan area there are normally several choices of four year undergrad collages and many community collages. Why anyone would choose to go away, out of state or private, especially if they plan on a post grad degree is beyond me in this day and age. Where you get your Masters or Doctorate is far more important than your undergrad. Paying room and board on top of tuition is to me, plain dumb. Stay at home, work and pay as you go. Both girls will be going on to grad school (vet and Paleontologist respectively) and both plan to do that at the top two state schools in Michigan. That will be harder, but both will be working.
Which is great if you live near a university that offers what you want to major in but not always an option. I had no colleges near my hometown that offered Mechanical Engineering and at the time there were only two universities in the state that offered Mechanical engineering (both of which were fairly large universities with massive classes which is an environment I knew I would not do as well as I could in) and none that offered aerospace. Plus going out of state allowed me to end up in a tech hub and made finding a job after college much easier (especially important when you consider the economy hadn't fully recovered in 2011).