<p>"The drop out grades, and the tortured undergrad history cost me a job 13 years later (as a top law school grad). "</p>
<p>I’d like to hear more about this. Please fill in some details including how you know that it was those factors that cost you a job.</p>
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<p>It won’t. In most cases, when you compile a resume or fill out a job application, you only list the college you graduated from. No one even needs to know that you started at a CC.</p>
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<p>Me. too. Unless you end up being convicted of a crime, what you did those first few years isn’t going to have an effect on your success after graduation (unless you are trying to get into med school or law school). It is possible to recover from a bad decision.</p>
<p>I didn’t even have a problem getting into grad school and I went to a CC - failed- went to another CC and did well, quit and then a few years later went back to a extension campus of our state flagship before transferring to the main campus and graduating and still went on to get an MBA. I have a great job making six figures.</p>
<p>Don’t succumb to all or nothing thinking. It’s not a one-shot deal. Kids often take very circular routes to get to the desired outcome - a college education and degree and they do just fine. Some of those people are the brightest and most interesting people you will ever meet. They don’t always ‘follow the pack’ and do exactly as they are told. They need to find their own way and blaze their own trail but they end up doing great long-term.</p>
<p>Check the college your student plans to attend next. Do they accept CLEP or DSST exams? (You can check the Find A College tool at Collegeboard.com and view the SAT/AP/CLEP page. CLEP acceptance is at the bottom of the page…but do check the school’s website for details. Sometimes there are limitations on CLEP acceptance.)</p>
<p>If the school accepts CLEP or DSST, your student can study for these on his own and build college credit this semester. There is a CLEP board on College Confidential in the testing section. Note: These tests can be scheduled whenever your student is ready. They are not like AP exams, given only once a year. I’ve heard of highly motivated students earning 30 credits in a month with credit-by-exam!</p>
<p>Blue stocking law firm made it clear that it was not a virtue to drop out of school ever, even if I went back and worked three jobs and earned a great GPA by the time I graduated.</p>
<p>No one held community college against me as I didn’t even put it on my resume, IIRC.</p>
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<p>LOL, my sister started off at our local CC, stopped going to class but didn’t drop the classes, so she had a transcript consisting of a semester of Fs. Years later she went to a 4 year state U and got a degree.</p>
<p><b>It never “helps” a college when students flunk, drop out or transfer. Some may not care all that much about retention and graduation rates, but it doesn’t help them</b>.</p>
<p>Modadunn,
After our son was permanently dismissed last year, we privately hired a college consultant to help plot what was left of his academic future.</p>
<p>For several reasons she did not turn out to be a good investment. (She was a rather lazy windbag, to be frank. We learned a great deal about her own son, but little that helped our own!) </p>
<p>BUT she claimed - by the by -that she “always” checked when doing admissions research whether or not a college had a policy of calling in the local police to deal with conduct problems on campus.
(This was not something we had thought to check in advance. Son had been given a substantial merit scholarship to this not-prestigious college & that - along with his determination to follow his then best buddy to this particular university - had influenced our choice.)</p>
<p>Looking back over our disaster, it was as if the college administration was superglued to a permanent dismissal penalty from the moment his misconduct became a “police matter”.</p>
<p>Obviously, this seemed especially painful because it was the college who had phoned the police to come and deal with the small quantity of cannabis found in our son’s shared dorm room during the course of a midnight search (of several rooms in his corridor) by dorm staff. (We thought our son was exaggerating - out of shock - when he said six officers turned up & took him off in handcuffs. He was only slightly. There were five officers.)</p>
<p>Even though, as I wrote earlier, a criminal charge of possession was dropped against our son. His very able lawyer had even managed to get a hearing establishing that the criminal charge was due for dismissal BEFORE our son’s internal college misconduct hearing. (The actual court dismissal was duly finalized at a later date.)</p>
<p>In fact, his internal college hearing was such a chaotic mess (objectively!), that our son immediately appealed, on the specific grounds he had been refused permission to read out to the discipline panel his prepared statement of explanation (and remorse). </p>
<p>The college upheld the penalty (permanent dismissal) but allowed him to continue at the college until the end of that semester - a month later. The original penalty had been “leave NOW”.</p>
<p>So while I agree that logic supports your statement - that colleges are not “helped” by booting out students, there is an important caveat.</p>
<p>If that college is a) not remotely top tier and b) readily invites the police onto campus - the administration may see it as advantage to demonstrate a showy zero tolerance policy.</p>
<p>Actually, I am still pretty torn on this.
We are conventional parents; both of us were lucky enough to attend top universities (where everyone was “pulling a Clinton” - referring to his “but I didn’t inhale!” quote, NOT the other stuff…).
OTOH, no one actually wants their kid to go to a reefer madness campus. And personally I am prim about drugs. No one should be allowed to touch them until they’re 60.</p>
<p>I guess I feel that, had I known in advance, I might have been impressed by the college’s apparently deadly serious “in loco parentis” policy to illegal student stupidity.</p>
<p>As it turns out - our son will be paying for a very long time for his appalling idiocy.</p>
<p>Wildwood II -thanks for the article. . </p>
<p>Reading the article lead to me reflecting on why bright kids struggle in college.
My daughter has a theory (she attends a top LAC) based on on her conversations with these very bright boys not doing well. She feels many of them were so micromanaged by their moms and dads that once in college, they are burned out and ready to have fun (for example,one young man she knows had mom as his personal secretary, organizing his AP folders, making master calendars of due dates for HS projects and tutoring him in the summer in subjects like calculus and chemistry. Another was taken to the lab at the college where his dad was a professor and nudged through elaborate lab work from the time his was in middle school). </p>
<p>I could go on with the examples she has given me. She feels so many achieved at the expense a carefree social life. How much time does a kid have to hang out if he is taking 5 APs, doing clubs and volunteer activities ( and the last two mentioned are not venues for normal social interaction-too structured in the sense that you are operating out of a role)?</p>
<p>I don’t see sports participation as a “normal” route for building social skills for down time, either. Again, sports are too structured and goal focused to help a young person become comfortable in settings where there is no “script” to follow. I think some of these struggling kids are enjoying the “simple” social activities-hanging out in a dorm room and being silly, engaging with others with no other purpose in mind than simply enjoying the company of the other person. They may also feel overwhelmed because they don’t know how to operate without a script (thus they hide in their dorm, can’t approach anyone for help).</p>
<p>I hope I am not offending anyone and I am not suggesting that any of the posters with a struggling child are guilty of micromanaging. I have been guilty of some of the activity that my daughter mentioned. </p>
<p>I bring this up because I read a lot about blaming the colleges for the failures in various spots on cc. When I look at my own child’s disappointments, it is the same behaviors and attitudes that create the problem, regardless of the setting he is in. Sometimes young people have to fail in order to develop more appropriate behaviors. I certainly was not motivated to do things differently as a young person. Staring failure in the face forced me to examine my attitudes and actions.</p>
<p>Disclaimer-my comments do not apply in situations where the child has struggled with mental health or learning disability issues.</p>
<p>“When I look at my own child’s disappointments, it is the same behaviors and attitudes that create the problem, regardless of the setting he is in. Sometimes young people have to fail in order to develop more appropriate behaviors.”</p>
<p>Hornet,
GREAT point.
I can feel myself getting riled up as I’ve posted (and I probably sound whiny).
That’s not helpful at all.
The son I’ve been posting about has always had a dangerously self-confident personality, too much charm and not enough sense.</p>
<p>We would have been genuinely dumbfounded if his older brother had messed up in this way.
(I’m just not ready - yet - to decide serenely that this whole episode has been a blessing in disguise in terms of the younger son’s personal choices & development. But we are working on it.)</p>
<p>Hornet,</p>
<p>Your D is mistaking the symptom – boys’ parents micromanaging them-- for the cause. Boys in general are less mature than are girls. Boys have less focus, organizational skills, self motivation. At first, for some boys, the parental help is needed for the boys to academically succeed, but after a while, the help becomes an unnecessary crutch. The boys sometimes run wild in college because if their parents had let them, they would have run wild in middle school and high school and would have flunked out despite being very bright.</p>
<p>In watching younger S, 21, interact on projects that included creating a summer camp with one of his female friends, I noticed she ended up being – what I called his “brain” – even calling him to wake him up in the morning – to make sure he’d get to the camp on time. She’d feel guilty if she forgot to remind him of something and then he didn’t follow through.</p>
<p>I kept telling her not to take on those responsibilities, but she kept doing it, and he kept enjoying having her as his personal assistant.</p>
<p>While I don’t agree with all the assumptions about playing sports, I will agree that there was a HUGE difference between being a captain’s parents for girls teams and being a captain’s parents for boys teams. What Northstarmom has to say about organization is absolutely true. But the real issue with why the moms in particular took on so much when it came to boys teams is the fact that beyond the organizational crap, the boys just don’t care about the rest of it and would prefer to just play their sport and be leaders on the field. Girls teams - captains send all their own emails with regard to practice changes, team building stuff etc. Boys – umm… nope.</p>
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<p>Bingo. At least in my case. My parents, bless their hearts, put a lot of pressure on me. Although I now appreciate it, I was extremely stressed the first year of college, and felt the world lifted from my shoulders after getting drunk at my first dorm party. And I’ve got to say that hormones probably played a big part in my initial demise, along with cold beer and hot California weather.</p>
<p>I think a lot of people who mentioned the CC route, might possibly the best route to 1.) save a lot of money for the first two years of undergrad and 2.) enter a good school with high academic standings from the CC. There will be alot of hills to climb, but there is still a bright future for kids who don’t make it through the first year of college.</p>
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<p>You’re right. But how do I solve the problem? I’m not micromanaging him as far as selecting his activities. I’m just reminding him to do his homework. Frequently. </p>
<p>Let him fail out and have to learn in the school of hard knocks? I see people lining up to say yes!!. But I don’t want him to live in my basement, or, failing that, to spend his life in a dead-end job. And again, I see people lining up to say “if he doesn’t like having a dead-end job, he has to shape up.” But when he’s not working on what he’s “supposed” to be doing, he’s still learning and thinking and doing all kinds of wonderful things. All I want to do is harness his intellectual energy to send him where he wants to go (not where I want him to go). He says he wants to go to a great school and do great things. But he gets distracted. He is truly a brilliant, absent-minded-professor type. We tell him that until he’s “made it” he has to live in the world, by the world’s rules. But he gets distracted by all the wonderful things there are to learn.</p>
<p>How do I harness him? How do I teach him to be self-sufficient?</p>
<p>GeekMom, love your edit reason!</p>
<p>We could have said this almost word for word: ‘when he’s not working on what he’s “supposed” to be doing, he’s still learning and thinking and doing all kinds of wonderful things.’</p>
<p>The bad news is that we never did figure out any way to fix that. The good news is that eventually he figured it out for himself–at least, well enough to get the job done and let his natural intelligence work for him. He’ll never be Mr. Focused-Goal-Oriented-Hyperefficient-Overachiever. But he does what he needs to do when he needs to do it, most of the time.</p>
<p>Hopefully the same thing will happen in your house before too long.</p>
<p>Geek, night and others,
You pose an excellent question -what do we do? I don’t know. Each of us has to figure out what is appropriate to stay out of with our individual sons. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I also have one of these boys. Bright, funny and loves learning what he wants to learn for the sheer pleasure of it. When he was 8 years old, he told me with a smile “If it weren’t for me, the winners wouldn’t have someone to beat”. He has never cared for competition or needed external achievement rewards to feel satisfied (this is the kid who used to leave top place swim meet ribbons in the yard or give them away to friends; if you ask him what his SAT score was, he has no idea-and it is not a bad score). If these boys are not getting into legal sexual or substance abuse trouble, perhaps trying to relax and enjoy who they are is what we should do. Nightchef, I agree with you and you offer encouragement for me with my son. Now if I can get his armchair psychologist sister away from her theories…</p>
<p>PS- Geek-having my son end up living in my basement is one of my biggest scare scenarios!</p>
<p>hornet…that thought scares me too and I have found myself saying things like “when you come home from school and get an apartment” or I show them a nice sofa and say “wouldn’t this be nice when you get an apartment?” </p>
<p>The thought of four adults coming back home to live scares the ----out of me.</p>
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<p>The local flagship state university is well-known for flunking a lot of kids in the intro chem course which has hundreds of students in the lecture. I’ve heard many stories about very bright kids who thought science was their passion who were weeded out in the first quarter. A lot of kids entering their freshman year have gotten by on natural intelligence – even in AP courses. They get hit hard, especially in a quarter system, when suddenly being smart is just not enough anymore and if you fall a week behind, it may be not be possible to repair the damage. S1 was weeded out of a science track by this course and went on to get it together the next quarter and graduated but it was a rough start to college. S2, on the other hand, also took chem his fist semester of college, but he took it at a small LAC on a semester system and had a completely different experience. He also had a strong background in the subject. </p>
<p>I think one downside of the quarter system is that there is really no time for students to get their bearings. If they need a few weeks to adjust, it’s already too late, and some kids are like the frog who doesn’t realize that the water is getting hotter and the frog ends up boiled to death. I think it’s important for parents to really warn their kids that this is a whole new ball game and much more difficult than high school and that they need to pay attention to their grades and get help as soon as they see a low grade or realize they don’t understand the material. S1 was the type of kid who put his head in the sand when there was a problem, rather than being pro-active. Lots of kids are like that. They need help knowing how to recognize when the water is heating up. I would echo the poster who didn’t understand why a professor wouldn’t look a student in the eye and tell them to drop the course. I think in smaller schools that should happen, but it’s unrealistic to expect a professor who has hundreds of students in an intro course to do that. All schools are not equal when it comes to helping a freshman who is in over his head.</p>
<p>Is it just me, or is there a long advertisement for Ipods and other things posted above on this thread? How do we get rid of that?</p>
<p>I click report problem post and type “ad” in the box.</p>