Should a College Degree be Convenient?

The Jain Family Institute (JFI) just released a fascinating analysis and tool that explores, what they term, the geography of higher education access. The analysis is intriguing.  They develop a school concentration index (details here) utilizing zip tabulation area data. An interactive visualization tool accompanies their analyses. Impressive stuff!

Fundamental to the analysis is the fact that:

The majority — 56.2 percent — of public four-year college students attend an institution under an hour’s drive away, and nearly 70 percent attend within two hours of their home, according to the latest Higher Education Research Institute’s CIRP survey (via econofact). 

Interestingly, JFI's analyses, and the interactive graphic, enables visualization of concentration with a 30 min., 45 min., or 60 min. distance.  It would be useful to see the data for a two-hour drive radius.

Two key challenges I see with  the analysis published are:

• First, geographic proximity is assumed to be essential.  This ignores online education opportunities available to part-time and full time students seeking higher education. The data for online programs suggest that most choose an institution geographically proximate. However, for online students. campus access is less important.
  
• Second, students are assumed to be homogeneous;  segments within higher ed evidence important behavioral differences.  Students pursuing an associates degree via face-to-face courses, generally, are part-time students and commute to/from campus.  For this segment, geographic proximity is important to enable integration of pursuing an education with work, family, and other life activities.
  
  Students pursuing a bachelors degree on a part-time basis similarily benefit from geographic proximity of campus to home.
  
  Students pursuing a bachelors degree full-time come in two flavors. Flavor one is the 'traditional' college model in which the student lives on or near campus. Geographic proximity of campus to home is less critical. These are the students that, per the data above, likely live a one to two hour drive from home.  Full-time students that elect to live at home and commute to campus are a second flavor. These students can save a considerable amount by living at home. At many schools, the cost of room and board exceeds the cost of tuition (net not gross). For these students, geographic proximity (i.e., a commute of less than an hour is critical). Commuter students in a major metro area, such as greater New York City, have access to mass transit options (e.g., train) that are not available in less populous areas. 

Does convenience matter for students pursuing higher education? As with anything interesting, it's complicated. I believe the short answer is yes. But that requires acknowledging and factoring into the analysis important differences between student segments.  A drive distance that may deter a student interested in pursuing an associates degree part-time may be viewed positively by a student seeking to live on campus and pursue their degree on a full-time basis (think buffer from 'surprise' parental visits).  This requires that the data be modeled separately for each student segment.   

NOTE: My interest is in understanding factors that might inhibit academically qualified and financially capable individuals from pursuing higher education.