<p>I have to wonder whether what your mom took away from that conversation was some serious spin put on the story of this situation by the boy’s parents. It’s more face-saving to blame a scholarship rather than saying that your child made immature/bad choices, choose to hang out with kids who were a bad influence, etc. etc. And perhaps there was part of the story left untold. Did he get into drugs? Was he suffering from a mental illness? People may not want to discuss or explain things like this, and prefer to divert the conversation to something that really wasn’t relevant.</p>
<p>One of my daughter’s friends just finished her first year on a full ride scholarship, and seems to be having great success. I agree with mom2collegekids that a story like that is the exception rather than the rule.</p>
<p>“I’ve never fully bought into the “skin in the game” idea, either.”</p>
<p>I don’t either. I think it’s a mindset and a mentality. My H and I were fully paid for, and we took our education very seriously and wouldn’t have thought of giving our academics anything less than our best efforts. My kids are full pays and they repeatedly express how grateful they are for how hard we’ve worked and the great gift that has been given them. I have very little fear that they don’t take their academics seriously just because they aren’t paying their tuition. I think this is very much an internal thing. </p>
<p>I never bought into the “skin in the game” thing either unless the child is known to be kind of flakey, immature, etc.</p>
<p>My kids went to private K-12 (and certainly they paid nothing towards that…lol), and they excelled.<br>
And tons of kids go to free K-12 publics…and they excel, too.</p>
<p>The mom’s “take away” is strange. What difference does it make if a school provides the money or mom&dad provide the money? Either way, he isn’t paying. </p>
<p>I’m actually quite stunned that an adult would raid their retirement account based on fears raised by this one story about another child who may have little in common with the OP. I recently met a parent of a Big 10 athlete who crashed and burned after the second year. The parent said nothing about scholarships. He said that the practice schedule was extremely demanding, I think even more so than they had been expecting, and his child was just too exhausted by it to perform well in his classes. The kid regrouped, attended cc, and has now transferred to state flagship.</p>
<p>Some students like some commenters had sufficient internal motivation and don’t need it. </p>
<p>Others who need some external push, however, may benefit from having “some skin” in the game…though I strongly disagree with loading up young students with tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in educational loan debt is necessarily the way to do it. </p>
<p>Then again, there are other students for which no amount of skin would be enough to motivate them out of turning in abysmally mediocre academic performances or worse, flunking out. A few college classmates who were placed on academic suspension or even expelled altogether were like that. </p>
<p>IMO, there’s no difference between you getting a full ride and your parents paying, at least with regards to motivation. Either way, it’s not your money. Getting scholarships doesn’t make you lazy, though. People choose to be lazy, regardless of circumstances.</p>
<p>Providers of full-ride scholarships almost invariably tend to be far less amenable to pleadings and appeals to being the “darling child” than most except the strictest stone-cold non-sentimental parents. </p>
<p>If one’s GPA falls below a certain GPA level, he/she can kiss that full ride and thus, possibly college good bye altogether. </p>