Your son might surprise you with his capabilities. Mine does every day. He is 19 and travels similar distances to his work (a part-time job) and University.
Also, even though I don't know much about your USA college system, these days lots of tertiary students (my son included) can do a lot of their studies online or face to face. If my son isn't up to the trip into Uni for a class, he watches it online afterwards. I was worried that he might miss out on the social life of Uni, being that he works and is mainly rushing in and out of Uni when he is there. However, my son isn't worried. He laughed when I was speaking to him about this and said: "Have you SEEN the people in my classes? They are NOT a lot of fun, it's a total nerd-zone" (he studies some new fangled IT thingamy which I don't know much about
These are very different times. When I was at Uni it was a requirement to be at 90% of classes. These days the Internet seems to have changed a lot of that.