[karatestomp]

> My wife and I decided to be in a major metropolitan area because of our kids and schools... but back before, we were living in more rural, mountain areas with a lot of access to outdoors.

The schools are the main thing preventing us from moving to a small town in nature. Most of them have really bad schools. If they don't it's because they're a rich-people enclave and housing's very expensive.

[barry-cotter]

The US is really big. There are many, many small towns out there and by pure random chance there will be over a 100 schools in small towns that are in the 95th percentile nationally for whatever metric you want to use. And if you move to a less populated state your chances of going to a prestige uni go way up because they like to say they have students from all 50 states.

Even if the schools are terrible in every rural school district you can get individual tuition for your children for very cheap compared to the difference in costs of real estate in urban versus rural areas. The average adjunct instructor at a college makes $3,000 per class. So for $24K your child could get individual college level instruction for 8 AP tests, as an upper bound. Cheap compared to the difference between a house in Boston and one two hours away.