Hi–wasn’t sure exactly what to title this, but I hope that subject line is somewhat descriptive. Here’s the deal:
Our younger son is planning to start at a state college in the fall. He is extremely bright, but has been a pretty terrible student through most of high school. He has been accepted to a decent campus through a combination of athletics, good luck, and personal charm.
We don’t want to pay for school if he’s not going to take it seriously. I happen to believe there’s a time in the future when he WILL have professional goals and the motivation to do well in school, but that may be years away. I’m OK with him starting at this college in September and giving it a shot, but I’m not going to support him staying there if he’s getting Ds and Fs or landing on academic probation. In that case, I’d rather have him leave school for a while till he’s ready to make the most of it. (And yes, I know there’s more to college than just grades.)
As a university professor, I’ve occasionally seen families set and implement an academic standard for their student. One very good student drifted below a 3.0 in a particular semester (literally a 2.96) and was immediately withdrawn from school by his father. I wouldn’t set the bar that high! but I’d like to stipulate a 2.5 overall and/or no Ds or Fs any semester . . . or something in that ballpark. And then he’s out if he falls below that at any point. I do understand that things happen and anybody can have a bad semester, and on the other hand this kid does best when there’s no wiggle room.
Have any of you created these kinds of family agreements with your child? What were the conditions, etcetera? How did it work out in practice?
Many thanks for any help!
Don’t pay for anything under a C, and if he can’t afford school for any quarter he can’t sign up. He’ll either need to get grades or a good job, and neither of those is a bad outcome. I’d make a very clear point that you know perfectly well that he can do this if he chooses, so no excuses. This is time to grow up.
It is good that you are thinking about this ahead of time. There have been past threads from parents who did not do so and were later disappointed that their kids did not meet their standards (even though there was no danger of academic probation or dismissal) and wanted to stop paying for college.
Things to consider:
- Are there any scholarships that require a high GPA to renew? If they are lost, will they make the college unaffordable, or merely mean that the student needs to take small (not cosigned) loans when he would not otherwise have to?
- Does the student's major have a secondary admission process, or require minimum grades or GPA to stay in?
- If the college does +/- grades, and you (for example) define "C" as the minimum acceptable grade, be sure to clarify what C- means.
- Be aware of what the college's academic probation and dismissal policies are.
- Do you plan to give a semester grace period to remedy any shortfall (i.e. your own version of academic probation)?
- You may want to be explicit about progress toward graduation within 8 semesters of school (not including gap or co-op semesters where no school costs are paid).
- Be aware that many employers use 3.0 GPA as an early screen to determine which college applicants to interview. While you may not want to make that a hard requirement, you may want to ensure that he knows about that.
We had an agreement.
- Our kids both had merit awards that required they maintain a 3.0 GPA. If they lost their merit awards, they were told they would not be able to continue at their private expensive universities.
- We paid for all courses with a C grade or better....but that meant that for any C grades the kids needed an A grade to meet the 3.0 GPA requirement.
- And D or F grades, regardless of overall GPA would have resulted in our kids coming back home and going to a much less costly college.
- We made it very clear that we would not pay for retakes of any failed or D grade courses.
- We paid for our kids (balance after merit) for our kids to attend college for the equivalent of four years. We let them know up front that any summer courses they took would be on their dime (one of our kids paid for summer courses).
You might also require that your S give you access to his portal so you can monitor his mid-term grades etc. (at least for the first year until he “proves” he is serious about college).
You really want to be sure you can follow through, your kid can and might cut off your portal access and mostly (as you know) you won’t have a clue to his progress until the end of the semester. You really are likely to have to pay for at least a year to see how it all shakes out. Good cooperative self motivated kids won’t need these safeguards so it really comes down to how much of this will end up being an empty threat. Here that means transferring to the local commutable school and living at home while continuing the degree, as you can see this is a double edged sword.
A warning about access to the portal. D was told very harshly that sharing her login with me was against the school’s policy. No sharing of login was allowed for anyone. If I happened to log in during one of her exams the assumption would be that she was logging in and cheating.
This is obviously very school specific. Friends had kids at schools where sharing portal passwords with parents was expected.
Are you co-parenting with a spouse, with student living in your home? Asking because it makes enforcing rules easier if there aren’t any divorce/remarriage situations.
I suggest you start with a discussion with your spouse. Rules that are not upheld, consequences that are ignored, one spouse giving in when the time comes to bring student home from college, any of this will make the rules meaningless.
How have you parented and applied discipline in the past? Do you mean what you say? Do you apply consequence even when your heart aches for your child?
Start by discussing ideas from this thread with your spouse. Having access all four years to grades is vital. Having a written agreement is vital.
(We failed to put in writing what we meant by “college is about more than just knowledge and grades, and we expect you to network, attend college fairs, etc.” Too much wiggle room for our kid!)
Think about study sessions, those provided by TAs or informal study groups, office hours, private tutors. What will you require from your child to make sure he is actually putting in effort? How will you measure effort?
Good luck to you. You are wise to be thinking about this now.
Some colleges allow for a separate parent login to the portal that has access to some things that are of interest to parents (sometimes access to specific items can be turned on or off by the student). Investigate whether that feature exists at the specific college.
My advice is be careful with ultimatums and be flexible. My oldest sounds much the same as the OP, smart but didn’t try overly hard and we had the same fears. He ended up having an issue his first semester (long story documented elsewhere on CC) that sidetracked him mentally and that first semester did not go well and the ramifications bled over to second semester. While second semester improved the result was suspension from the school. I am sure the poor grades were not just based on the situation he found himself in but also due to being away from home for the first time so some of the issue was definitely what we had feared going in.
My wife wanted to pull him home and force him to figure it out. I proposed another solution. My idea was let him go to the community college in the same town as the university to get back on track, get gen eds completed, and stay with his new social circle. He was able to live in the off campus apartment with his friends, stay in school, and save us some money. His fear was the social stigma of “flunking out” and this helped alleviate that as he “looked like” every university student in town, he just turned left instead of right when he left for class in the morning.
At the end of the day he made deans list both semesters at the CC, figured out how to get the work done, and no one (including his roommates) had any idea he was not at the university. He transferred back to the university, is doing great and still continues to take a class or two at the CC to knock out gen eds.
He has grown much more than pulling him home ever would have allowed. He has helped a few friends that ended up in his same situation by showing them a path back. He looks at all of the people from high school that are back home, not enrolled anywhere, knowing it could have been him and thankful we gave him the ability to work through an issue that no one could have seen coming.
I may be in the minority, but I am not a fan of parents having access to the portal. If they don’t trust their kid to be honest about how they are doing, that is an honesty issue, not a grades issue. So I would tell the child in the OP that you expect him to maintain a C or above in all classes (not a C average) or he will need to withdraw and get a job until he’s ready to undertake college level coursework.
We were more holistic in our requirements.
We told the kids we’d pay for 8 semesters period. That was the budget.
We told the kids we expected them to take advantage of every opportunity (well, not EVERY opportunity, since there are only 24 hours in a day) so that attending the debate between the Dalai Lama and Madeline Albright about “what does peace mean” was more important than another frat party.
We told the kids they needed to find jobs for the summer; if they needed to live at home while earning money, we’d come up with “house rules”; if they wanted to stay in their college town their salaries needed to cover their living expenses; if they wanted to travel for a bit they’d need to budget for that as well.
We told the kids that while our love would last forever, our financial support would end 10 weeks after graduation, so that meant figuring out a life plan while in college, not afterwards.
I don’t like a focus on grades in and of itself. Some kids can “excel” at college while getting B’s and C’s; some kids can be phoning it in and get mostly A’s. I know kids who are so busy “protecting” their GPA they never step out of their comfort zone intellectually, or are busy racking up A’s in courses that are notorious “guts” with few requirements and no challenge.
We had bumps along the way but it mostly worked. And the one we feared would be living on the couch forever managed to find a job, in the right city, doing the right thing, exactly what the plan had been by middle of August after commencement. So a little longer than “10 weeks” but the sound of his voice when he called to say he got the job offer was worth it. Several months of couch surfing then ensued until he got paid, found an apartment, and moved out but guess what- it wasn’t my couch, and he wasn’t complaining (or asking for money) so it’s all good.
OP- you don’t want your kid taking the easy version of “physics for poets” to get the A when you know he’s capable of getting a B in real physics, do you? Or loading up on “introduction to sociology” when he could be taking macroeconomics or a challenging Lit class? Or majoring in Recreation Management when his true love is chemical engineering, because he knows he can earn A’s in Recreation without a sweat?
So think through the implications of an emphasis on grades, and not on “what is success in college”.
I’ve always had an agreement with my kids since they were in high school. They went to an expensive private school in our state. I told them if they couldn’t keep a 3.5 gpa then they could go to our very good public school. In college it was 3.0 to stay and 3.5 to live in their sorority house.
As posted by others, the key here is would you be prepared to follow through. My kids knew me well and they knew I would pull them out. Lucky for them, their GPAs were way above the minimum.
As far as living at home after graduation, I couldn’t have paid them to stay. Both of them couldn’t wait to move out. Of course they knew, it wouldn’t be free for them to live at home. Mom’s bank was closed after graduation.
Is one class really going to end a career? My nephew got a D+ in Calc I his freshman year. He had to retake it, took Calc II in the summer to get back in sequence (he paid for it), graduated with a BS in Mech Eng in 4 years and an MS in that 5th year. Has a really good job now. If his family had had the ‘no D or F’ rule, he would have had to drop out, move home and do what?
He got the D from partying too much, but the second chance worked for him. The rest of his grades from freshman year were okay. Honestly, I may not have been that understanding but my sister was and it was the right decision.
My kids had to keep their scholarships with 3.0s and knew they’d have to transfer if they didn’t because of money, but even those allow for an occasional C- or D if there is an A to offset it.
Your son sounds a lot like me. I was doing pretty good my freshmen year in engineering until I got into a fraternity and most of my life seemed to be focused around partying and women… 
… ah good times!
My semester GPA went from a B+ average to a C average the spring semester of my freshmen year.
My father made it pretty clear to me like this “If you want to party all the time then you can pay for your own tuition, but if I am going to pay your GPA has to be above a 3.5 (B+ average)” Worked like a charm… because I knew he was serious and he would stop paying.
My GPA went back above a 3.5 the following years… probably also helped that I moved out of the fraternity and got a steady girlfriend. 
I have already warned my DS about the dangers of fraternities…
And yet most Greek house gpa’s are higher than the school average. My daughter’s sorority academic officer and her athletic coach got her grades before she did. Both the team’s and the sorority’s gpa’s were higher than the school average. That was the case for all sororities and fraternities at her school.
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As others have said, these agreements work best for the kid’s that don’t really need them. There is a difference between the kid that is working hard and ends up with a C in Organic Chemistry or a similar very tough class and a kid that is skating by with mostly Cs. The bottom line really is that the kid is an adult and will have to live with the consequences of a lousy GPA. If my kid were partying too much, not taking advantage of professor help sessions, getting mostly Cs and lower, and otherwise not at least trying, i would make them take a semester off. But setting a “no Cs” requirement may not work for all kids, especially in tough majors.
I have a friend that did this with one of her kids, but ended up not pulling him out. He graduated and has a good job, with an extra semester. If she had made him come home, I doubt he would finished. I know others that pulled their kids - one had to then live home and commute to college and after some floundering found his path. Another left for a year, lived home and then went back and graduated. He is working, but at a family company. In that case, it seems like pretty significant, undiagnosed ADD has made him less successful.
Hopefully, your son will do well without the stick. As others have said, think hard about your goals for him and what would really happen if he leaves college.
I’ll be a little more harsh than mom2and: There’s a fundamental dishonesty about this thread, tinged with more than a little righteous self-congratulation.
In terms of how I was brought up, the culture in which I was raised, the notion of parenting by contract is very alien. My parents mostly left me alone, and rarely if ever told me what to do. They didn’t monitor me; they didn’t reward success or punish failure; they did offer enormous support. My goal with my children was always education and modeling – my spouse and I tried both to teach and to show our children how to be happy, successful, productive, and good in the world. We talked with them about what we expected of them, and why; sometimes they pushed back, theoretically, but never too hard. When they ran into problems – which, thankfully, was not very often or very serious – we responded with a lot of love and support.
I don’t have a clue whether it worked or not. The outcomes have been pretty satisfactory, but it wasn’t exactly a controlled experiment, and no challenge ever tested our approach much. We mainly consider ourselves lucky: Our children, while independent people, largely share our values, and see their own interests more or less as their parents do.
It seems like most of you could say exactly the same thing. I don’t think you love or respect your children less than I do, even though you have (or had) a very different way of expressing it, and you, too, have had fortunate outcomes.
But . . . don’t call it a contract. I am completely missing the element of bargaining between equals acting without compulsion, and with alternatives, that characterizes the moral authority of contracts. Most of the stories here seem completely one-sided threats: “This is what I want you to do, and these are the ways I will punish you if you don’t.” Some “contract”! It’s just an exercise of power.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly that everyone ought to be transparent with their children about what the parents expect, and what limits there are on the resources available to the children. If pretending there’s a “contract” makes that easier, great. But I suspect it works only in the circumstances where my completely different approach also worked – children and parents are already fundamentally in agreement about what’s in the children’s interest, and left to their own devices the children would do what their parents wanted anyway. Or mostly at least. (I have been following what oldfort writes about her daughters for years. I don’t believe for a second any part of their academic success was due to mom setting minimum conditions for them to live in the sorority house.)
I would be interested in hearing stories from people who actually carried through on their threats and it worked out well. If one of my kids had stumbled in college, I would have been looking for the response that gave them the best chance for a good future. A lot would have depended on the reason for the stumble. Cutting off support might have been an option on the table in some circumstances, but it would never have been a one-size-fits-all solution.
@MohnGedachtnis I think you’re misreading. The OP is a university prof and has watched this kid not produce throughout his high school career: “He is extremely bright, but has been a pretty terrible student through most of high school. He has been accepted to a decent campus through a combination of athletics, good luck, and personal charm. We don’t want to pay for school if he’s not going to take it seriously.” This isn’t a clean slate, what-if situation so the family is asking for experiences. And the answers are starting from a point where letting him find his own way hasn’t really worked well. These suggestions are an alternative path with tighter guidelines, not self-congratulatory grandstanding. This thread features some very senior members with long and reasonable histories, and they’re mostly on the same page. Take another look.