You seem mostly ignorant about what city life is like I have lived in NYC, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Toronto, London, Tampa, and San Francisco. The downtown p

You seem mostly ignorant about what city life is like I have lived in NYC, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Toronto, London, Tampa, and San Francisco. The downtown parts, not their burbs. I think that qualifies me to have an opinion about city living. This is ignorant, tbh. Elementary and middle school students take the subway to school alone, all the time. Some places, sure. Others you can get arrested for that: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/single-dad-barred-from-sending-kids-to-school-on-city-bus-1.3577295 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/single-dad-barred-from-sending... Sure there are great public schools, but... the great ones are generally competitive admissions drawing from wide areas. The number 1 school being: Students from Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun, and Prince William counties and from the Cities of Fairfax and Falls Church are eligible for admission.[32] Students must be enrolled in Algebra 1 or a higher level math class in 8th grade and have a minimum GPA of 3.5 to be eligible While that school might technically qualify as public, the admissions process looks like a private school to me. When I say "public school", I'm talking about the school that your kid is going to go to "by default" outside of any kind of lottery system. I can assure you that in Philly that meant craptacular. Despite the reputation of Masterman the only Philly school in your top 150. Their enrolment is hyper competitive. Masterman's acceptance rate is 3% of applicants making it more selective than Harvard University. I do agree that rural schools are not universally great or even good. Ours happens to be and we selected for that. I would say that understanding the community's expectations for post graduation are key. If the community does not expect the vast majority of high school graduate to go to 4 year college then the local school system priorities are likely to align with that expectation and that is important to understand. I understand we are all attempting to help the OP. You were the one that introduced the spurious points about resource dependencies, the flow of social security checks and reallocation of school funding. All these seem to having nothing to do with city vs urban living and in my opinion apply more to city living than rural living. In fact New York State had to be sued to properly fund NYC public schools.