AIBU for pressuring my son to apply to unis close to home?

Yes you’re being unreasonable. The student experience - living & socialising with your peers and enjoying your first taste of proper independence - is one of the most exciting parts of going to university. Why on earth would he want to live at home with his parents instead & miss out?

Isn’t it against the law to start an AIBU thread, read the replies, and accept you were being unreasonable, @SassyBear2? 😉🥰😁

@SassyBear2 - i think you’ve made the right decision. Good luck to your son for his applications!

Was this a joke all along?

Many MN queries come across as false to me - this one is a contender especially given that it dangled the patently impossible idea of commuting to an Oxbridge college.

If not, all good wishes for the future to your son.

Yes I admit this is true. OP isn't coming back to the thread. It would have been very helpful to know where OP is based.

I know not everyone lives in London. And not everyone lives near a university.

I would never recommend commuting to Oxbridge. And some commutes are easier than others. It depends on the time, method of transport and how many changes. A bus ride from home to uni is different to multiple trains needed

Yabvvu.
Once parties die out so he should then live at home. Yeah cos that’s a thing.
Parties “might” be fewer but friendships have been formed. And by third year the workload will have increased.
no student wants to mess about spending two hours of every day travelling.
Living away is a key reason for going. I honesty don’t see the point otherwise.

Glad I didn't need to do this. Our DC would took loans for fees only maintenance for one year

Probably would have had to fork out money instead of savings thousands of pounds.

Yes
£1100 a month each
4 year courses (Scotland)
No fees though (Scotland)
Glad we could support them

I think living in a city which has multiple world-class universities is an outlier position, very different from the vast majority of parents / students. In most cases, the decision to stay local and live at home would entail restricting choice and / or compromising quality and / or (Oxbridge) potentially breaching residence requirements. It does also postpone the normal timing of the step into independent young adulthood, the making of friends and mistakes and decisions that is so much part of young adult life.

I feel so sorry for students who are pressured to live at home through uni. I mean, totally fair enough if they actually want to live at home, but they do miss out on a lot.

The only students who have dropped out of dd's uni course have been people commuting in from home.

Finances shouldn't be a barrier with your household income, I think you should support him to go where he wants to go.

Doesn't Oxford Uni have residence requirements anyway? I know that Cambridge does. I don't think you'd be allowed to commute from as far as an hour away?

£100k on university support alone?

Of course we have arguments at home. I wanted them to commute all 3 years, they relented. DH was always supportive of one year in halls. The eldest didn't want to go to uni in London, we did argue at home, they then went to LSE and loved it.

I think it is totally unfair of you and your DH to try to influence your DS with regard to his choice of Uni & accommodation.
it is quite simply not your life, not your decision to make.
And yes I do know what I am talking about; all 4 of my DCs have been to University including one to Oxbridge.
Please stop making this about you.

If you hadn’t lived in London, instead living in, I don’t know, Warrington, or Worcester, or Wrexham, would you still have insisted your DC lived at home due to cost and said you couldn’t afford them living away and thus had to go to a local university?

Please don’t do this to him, he’ll remember it forever. enthusiastically support him.

There are two different issues here.

1. Going to university locally when your DC can stay at home is cheaper
2. I doubt very much that a prospective employer is going to discriminate against a graduate because they went to Durham, St Andrews or even Bath (which is consistently a top 10 university) instead of UCL or Imperial.

I get that,mine have cost me over £100k already
Not that I grudge it,happy to support them
But do all your DC just agree to go along with what you want ?
Do none of them get annoyed
They must be very compliant!

I would have said no we can't afford it.

We saved thousands of pounds having DC stay in London.

LSE is better for social sciences than most other UK unis. Imperial is better for the natural sciences. Only exceptions would be Oxbridge. As I said there'd be no "value add" in moving away from London unless it was Oxbridge. What would be the advantage had my eldest turned down LSE Economics to do economics at Bath, Bristol, Nottingham etc? We saved so much money just staying in London.

@Gfff
what would you have done if they had said they wante to go to X uni
or even stayed in a flat for 2nd year
I genuinely don’t understand how you can /or why you would seek to control your DC in this way
Do they all just say yes mum no mum
I have had years when more than 1 DC was at Uni,it’s just all part of the system

We pay rent and spending money so they will not have loans to repay

There is no such thing as the 'best university'. There is no such thing as the best course. It is a question of what best suits an individual student – and there are multiple factors involved in that.

It's not just about league tables, which tend to rely on a number of subjective factors in any case.

Doesn't exactly hurt to go to one though? Why not go to the best university possible? My main thing was that since we have the best on our doorstep it's very easy to commute to them.

I think it's the dismissive way you have written about universities that aren't in London. Not everyone needs to go to a "world class" university for their career choice.

Yes of course it's their choice what to study. Why the sarcasm?