<p>My son is currently a college freshman. Within two days of arriving on his campus last fall, he announced that he'd made a mistake and wanted to transfer. He was at his first choice school, which he'd been very excited about attending, and we told him he hadn't given it enough time and that he had to stay for at least one year before he could transfer. </p>
<p>Well, he's been there almost a year now, still insists that he hates it, and so we just made a deposit at a different school. The thing is, I don't really think he ever gave his first place a decent chance and it frustrates me so much that now we're starting all over again with orientations, housing forms, etc etc. WE JUST DID THIS!! </p>
<p>In the meantime, I've been shocked at how many stories I hear from other parents about kids transferring because the school is too far from home, too close to home, too technical, not technical enough, too southern, too preppy, too isolated, too urban. I can't believe how many kids are transferring! Enough! </p>
<p>When I was in college 25 years ago, I can hardly remember any transfer stories. Are kids today just giving up too easily? They are raised in a culture of 400 cable channels and if they don't like what they are watching, they just hit the remote control button and change. Is this generation losing the ability to stick things out, to make the best of them, and see if maybe they get better? Are they going to give up so easily on marriages, jobs, careers?</p>
<p>“Are kids today just giving up too easily? They are raised in a culture of 400 cable channels and if they don’t like what they are watching, they just hit the remote control button and change. Is this generation losing the ability to stick things out, to make the best of them, and see if maybe they get better? Are they going to give up so easily on marriages, jobs, careers?”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I believe you have hit the nail on the head. Back when I went to college, precious few kids even got to visit a college before they arrived and they were expected to stick it out for four years. Transfers very rarely happened and if they did, it was for familiy reasons - sick parent, job loss, etc. I do believe in our efforts as a society to make a better life for our children, we have failed them by letting them believe the grass is always greener, rather than teaching them to add some fertilizer and cultivate their own green grass. Best of luck to your son!</p>
<p>There are two sides to this. On the one hand, I do agree there is virtue in sticking it out sometimes. On the other hand, there is something to be said to have initiative to make changes when something isn’t right, instead of passively accepting it. </p>
<p>Today’s young people are in the middle of “change.” We never thought that email would become a standard form of communication, and internet would become the biggest tool for class equalizer (information is power, and that used to be only accessible to the wealthy and powerful). If our kids were to only accept status quo then innovations would never come about.</p>
<p>The cost of education has skyrocketed in the recent years. It is an expensive expenditure, so people are spending time to research it to make sure they are getting their money’s worth. As information is more readily available, both students and parents feel like there were more options. It is not surprising to me that more students are transferring. I think many of us applied to fewer colleges because information wasn’t as readily available and it was more difficult to apply to multiple schools. We stayed at our one college, not because we had more staying power, but because we didn’t know we could made a change.</p>
<p>I also do not think that just because things move faster now, it means our kids’ family or personal values would change. Those core values come from us and the way they were brought up. I have come across many young people, aside from my own kids, and they all have great work ethics and they don’t give up at the first sign of failure. My own kids have had very traditional boy/girl relationships. I also think they would go into a long term relationship someday with the same seriousness as we did.</p>
<p>I congratulate your son in knowing when something is not right and has enough initiative to make a change, instead of sitting back and whine about it.</p>
<p>I think so. Everyone has a rough transition, but I talk to a lot of college students who just hit campus four weeks ago and want to transfer somewhere else. It’s a combination of growing up in a world where (especially if they are middle or upper class) they’ve always had choices and if they didn’t like something, they could simply bow out; where because they were high-achieving students in high school, things came easily to them but now they don’t because college is challenging; and just getting ‘stage fright’ about being far from home with 1,000 to 20,000 strangers.</p>
<p>I think a lot of kids also expect to be 100% happy with a place. When they’re only 80% happy with a place, they go seeking that other 20%. They fixate on it, sometimes.</p>
<p>Usually after a year I think a kid knows whether or not he or she wants to stay somewhere, but sometimes you get kids who decided in the first 6 weeks that they are going to hate the place and are determined to hate it from then on, so they don’t get involved in anything and refuse to engage. When I was an RA I had a student like that in my dorm. She was (understandably) angry because her parents made her go to my college and she was determined to not like it and transfer out in a semester or a year, as that was the agreement between she and her parents. Because she was determined to dislike it, she disengaged - she rarely went out, she went to class and came home, she didn’t engage with any activities or any other students. (In fact, my attention was called to her because her roommate reported she was depressed.)</p>
<p>She did indeed leave after a semester. I think had she given the school a chance maybe she would have liked it, maybe she wouldn’t have, but there’s no way of knowing, because she didn’t.</p>
<p>We tend to over-romanticize the college experience (particularly here on this forum) and create the illusion that once the student moves into the dorm at his or her “dream school” (or, the acceptable next choice) life will be heaven filled with fantastic parties, close friendships and constant stimulating intellectual debates. The reality is often quite different and it can be disappointing and isolating.
My son almost transferred after freshman year (did transfer apps after actually leaving school briefly in March of freshman year) but decided to remain and change some things to make the school work for him.
I think a lot of kids transfer, and I don’t have a problem with it. It is actually pretty difficult to anticipate exactly what things are going to be like at the school that is selected.</p>
<p>We also communicated less with our parents. I spoke to them once a week; by then most of the bad stuff had already been dealt with or processed or forgotten. I have neighbors and friends who speak to their college kids several times a day- A DAY. So the kids never have to make actual friends (you know, the people you surround yourself with who help you develop coping mechanisms). They have Mom and Dad to hover, worry, vent, etc. So the problems become magnified, nobody ever says to their kid “Stop calling me and go find a mature way to deal with problem X.”</p>
<p>30 years ago I transferred after my sophomore year. I realized the situation was not going to change when I went back the second year. I don’t think there are that many more students transferring. Of DD’s friends and HS classmates, only about 4-5 have transferred from their first school. Some for change in majors. Some found the school was not what they thought it was. .</p>
<p>OP – being a few yrs out of college and law school, I definitely think people don’t stick to things now as much as they used to. There may be valid reasons – more information available, college costs more so you want it to be right etc. But, ultimately, it seems like students expect that college (and jobs) will be perfect and when they aren’t, they mentally check out, decide they’re going to leave in a year anyway and never give it a real chance. I think the poster that mentioned the constant communication with parents is on to something. There are college students who speak to mom/dad once every few hrs and will tell them everything – from complaining about the lunch selection in the cafeteria to complaining about a class/prof. With all of that complaining, they are able to ‘convince’ themselves that the place isn’t right. I have to imagine it was different in the previous generation because when you spoke to your parents once a week, you probably weren’t telling them about how last weekend’s lunch was awful. I think if they were relying more on their peers than their parents, the attitudes would be different bc they would feel stupid complaining to their peers about some of these trivial things and frankly sometimes peers don’t want to hear it because they’re dealing with it too.</p>
<p>And btw, this attitude is spilling over into jobs and is completely frustrating those of us who have people working for us who are like this. I know a very significant number of young lawyers from top schools who come into high paying (but demanding) jobs and decide right of the bat 'I hate this and I’m only going to stay for x number of yrs to make money for [loans/a house/whatever] ’ With that attitude, they are checked out – only doing what they need to do to get by, not particularly concerned with developing the right professional skills, and constantly dreaming about how a job somewhere else would be so much better for whatever reason [usually – the bosses there will be nicer; the hours will be less demanding; or the work won’t be boring]. I think it’s a good idea to talk to students about how nothing is perfect and at some point they need to pick something and stick with it and make it work even if it wasn’t what they were expecting. I had parents who did that when I was complaining as a college frosh and they weren’t particularly ‘nice’ about it and that was the end of my whining. That attitude adjustment helped with school and work and was ultimately much better than if they had agreed with me that my trivial concerns were an issue and encouraged a transfer bc I think that would have left me with the impression that I can leave with things get tough.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the responses. It’s interesting to see the different points of view. In my son’s case, I think that we had been telling him for years that college would be “the best time of your life” and his expectations were just too high. When he got to campus and it wasn’t perfect, he thought there was something wrong with the school. In spite of our encouragement, he never joined any clubs/teams/activities and basically never really tried to make things better and just complained about everything and that’s why I am so frustrated with him. </p>
<p>It would have been totally different if he’d given it a few months even, really tried to engage and get involved, and then said, “you know what, I think maybe this school isn’t right for me.” Of course we want him to be happy and we would have worked with him to see if he could improve where he was, or to find a better fit. But this was more a case of an immediate judgement (really, I’m talking two days into orientation, he told me he wanted to transfer!), and then just giving up and being mad about anything we tried to suggest to make things better. </p>
<p>This seems to be the case with a lot of other students we are hearing about who are transferring. They are bored or homesick or they have a hard class or a difficult roommate and boom! the answer is to disrupt everything and go to a different place! And we as parents (yes, I know I am guilty of this) let them do this instead of forcing them to try to work things out.</p>
<p>I’m hoping this is more a matter of immaturity on my son’s part and not the beginning of a pattern of quitting. The irony is that the school he chose to transfer to is very similar to the school he’s at, so it will be interesting next year to see what happens when he finds out, again, that the place isn’t perfect. I’m hoping it’s a valuable lesson.</p>
<p>All of D1’s immediate college friends are still there, and all of her high school friends are still at their first school. I hear more about transfers on CC, but maybe it’s because parents post to get feedback when they want a second opinion.</p>
<p>kierans, it’s good that your son did stick it out for the year.</p>
<p>One of my daughter’s friends hated her school from the first week, went home every weekend, and dropped out after the first semester (even though she finished the semester with a 3.7 GPA).</p>
<p>She is now living at home, driving her parents crazy, did not seriously research transfer schools, and is basically reluctant to get back on the college horse after falling off.</p>
<p>Hopefully our kids and their friends will all find their way, some may just take a more circuitous route than we would hope.</p>
<p>Life’s too short to spent it somewhere less-than-desirable. As long as he’s going to another college (and not dropping out to work at McDonalds) than I don’t see why it’s a big deal.</p>
<p>The pattern I’ve seen in our HS is that kids go relatively far away (5 hrs plus) and end up transferring to a school much closer to home where some (or a lot) of their high school friends are. In some cases, the kids couldn’t get into these schools as a freshman but ended up getting in as a transfer student. Is your son transferring to be closer to home and with HS friends? Just curious. Most of my son’s friends are going to the local university (30 mins away) but he’s going to another part of the state (1.5 hrs away) with only one other kid from HS. I’m afraid having all the other kids here is going to give him an incentive to want to transfer. Hoping he’ll get involved with things at school asap to try and avoid this.</p>
<p>I don’t see this problem as uncommon but I tend to agree with OldFort. At the end of the day, you want them to look back on their college experience as positive. I’m okay with 1 transfer, just not multiple ones, which is what a few kids do.</p>
<p>Yes, he is about 400 miles away now and he’s transferring to a school much closer to home. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it; he misses his HS friends. BTW, the new place is costing us A LOT more money, which certainly increases my frustration.</p>
<p>I agree, life is too short, college is too short! If after a year, you don’t like your school, transfer. I think most times the pros outweigh the cons of doing so. I think perseverance at times is overrated.</p>
<p>Having said that I do think the college admissions process now is such that students might have such very high expectations that sets them up for a greater probability of disappointment. There is this idea that there is one ‘perfect fit’, that each and every college is very different than the other, that college (often at $50k a year) should be the end all-be all and time of one’s life…so no surprise if there is far greater disappointment (not sure there is, I’m just guessing maybe that is the case). This is the era of 10-15 applications vs. 2-3, with guide books, school visits, hired counsellors and coaches, accepted day, videos, and of course CC…schools aren’t better, they are just marketed more and everyone plays into it. That hype might set up some kids for the wrong expectations.</p>
<p>Usually it’s not the place that is less than desirable. It’s what’s between the ears. Crazy expectations, instant gratification, being unable to break away from HS friends. What a screwed up generation. Put down your stupid phones and actually live in the moment.</p>
<p>kierans…this thread is very interesting to me. D2 is finishing up her freshman year and will be transferring for next year. Her current school is approximately 5 hrs from home and she will be returning to a school less than 30 minutes from here. Her situation was complicated by the fact that she was a DI recruited athlete. She started half the games as a freshie and got lots of playing time, worked hard for a 4.0 her first semester but the culture of the team and school just didn’t work out for her. On paper this place looked great. I always thought she was a small private LAC kid and was surprised by her choice but supported her decision. Her transfer school is a small private LAC. I admire her for proving she could be a top student and a top athlete but also admire her for realizing this wasn’t the place to be. I don’t think she is a quitter and I don’t think it will carry over in to realtionships or her career. Sometimes it is the place that is less than desirable.</p>