<p>Son’s college does not allow cars for freshman so not an issue. Also he’ll be going from California to Pennsylvania so I doubt he’ll ever have a car there.</p>
<p>As far as other expectations he’s got a merit scholarship that requires a 3.0 GPA</p>
<p>My son will have to rely on others for rides to crew practice, club team, practice 20 or 30 minutes from campus. The upperclassmen on the team told him not to bring his car. They help arrange rides. He would have needed special permission from the school to bring it. we figure he’ll be the driver next year, he’ll still need permission for a car but we’ll let him request it sophmore year.</p>
<p>I read wth relish and grins all the different experiences and viewpoints. True, it is a function of both the LAC, location, and the teen’s personality. I appreciated the CC’s input (robins…s), as she sees first-hand the distraction vehicles pose. J-209, the feeling of “entitlement” does seem to be permeating this young culture, and hasn’t escaped my D - which is one reason I feel strongly that she should not have a car - at least for the first semester, if not year. Endicott, the “princess” moniker is not lost, either. Ditto. Anxious, another crazy, notrichenough, some…, ordinary, etc. - all good input and points on car, grades, and expectations. You have all confirmed thoughts I’ve been mulling over. thanks, and wish us luck!</p>
<p>I didn’t have a car until I was almost 40, myself. I used public transportation. My son is 24 and working in Silicon Valley, and rides the train or a bike. My two daughters, college age, don’t drive either. They were too busy and we didn’t want to spend the money on insurance, and we don’t have an extra car. So that makes the car question easy.</p>
<p>I know every student is different on the grades thing. If I have a kid who is so unmotivated as to need that kind of guidance from me on a minimum GPA, which is basically an external incentive, then I wouldn’t send him or her to college at all. Wait a minute, I do have a kid like that (out of 3) and she is not going next year, but working for awhile.</p>
<p>I also agree with the professor above: the important thing is to graduate, and as one poster said, some kids need to be told that a B is okay, and for them, it is better to talk about learning, not grades, to keep the focus on the right thing.</p>
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<p>A whole lotta CC kids need to hear this before they go off to HYPSM and other highly selective/competitive places as well.</p>
<p>Some of them kids need to be told the occasional C is ok too!</p>
<p>Having a car puts a lot of pressure on a college kid. If he is going somewhere that is the same destination or on the way of where others are going, it really doesn’t look good to turn down a request for a ride. The same if someone has an “emergency”, not true one but still something important, or a pity story. Kid want to be liked and they want to be generous and saying no can be difficult. </p>
<p>It’s also expensive giving a kid a car, though I guess those who are considering it can afford it.</p>
<p>My kids had cars in high school because it was convenient for me and they have their cars in college for the same reason, it’s convenient for me. My older son has a car which he can park for free at his apartment and we have had no issues with him abusing the privilege. He has loaned out the car to some close friends after ascertaining that they are on their parents’ insurance. It’s convenient for me because he can make the 3 hour drive home when he wants to and I don’t have to go get him. He didn’t have the car freshman year and it was hard to get rides because he couldn’t always leave when the driver wanted to go. </p>
<p>My upcoming freshman is taking his car to college but the parking lot is very far away from his dorm making it extremely inconvenient to use. He knows that under no circumstances is he to drive it at night to parties. He will be 4 hours away and there is no public transportation from here to there. Both cars belong to my husband and me and we insure them. They are both cars we drove and just kept when we bought new ones. One is a 1998 and one is a 2001 mini-van, not the coolest car for a college junior but he knows he is lucky to have it.</p>
<p>I still wouldn’t let other kids drive my car even if they are insured. If anything should happen the injured party will go after whoever got the deep pocket.</p>
<p>Maybe D1 is just insensitive, but she has never felt pressured to drive or loan her car to anyone. </p>
<p>We treat having cars as a necessity, not a luxury, and definitely not something to show off to people. We are living at a place where we no longer need multiple cars. We have one car that is provided by my company, and we do not miss having cars. We got rid of 2 cars in the US and kept one for D1 because it has one more year on the lease. If we couldn’t have a car for D1 she would have just taken cabs to go where she needed to go to at school. For us, there is no real value system attached to it.</p>
<p>Colleges offer all kinds of different transportation options and this is just slightly off topic. A couple of years ago, my daughter attended a crew camp at Rutgers. The crew practice site was some distance from campus and crew practice was early in the morning, so some wizard on the team came up with the idea of calling the “drunk bus” for a ride to practice. It worked–once. Which may be how often kids may get rides form other kids!</p>
<p>Do not rely on school banning cars for freshman or fresh/soph. S’s school supposedly does so but, in truth, hands out parking permit to any underclassman who asks. S’s car went to second semester freshman year and will not go back for sophomore year. Son breached agreement that car could not be used by/for others and learned many lessons: he was used as a taxi; friends borrowed car and did not replace gas (one actually called him to tell him that the car had been left far from campus since it ran out of gas!); girlfriend had accident causing thousands of dollars damege to another student’s car, etc., etc. Final lesson is that, until greater maturity is demonstrated, Mom has drawn the line and car stays at home!</p>
<p>D will be headed to a small rural college as well and she won’t be having a car either, but they do offer a shuttle service into town once or twice a day, so that will help out. Plus maybe the kids that do bring cars can do a ride share. Her school is back east and we live in the pacific northwest so bringing a car just wouldn’t really work with that kind of distance.</p>
<p>When I went to college, I took my car. Freshmen couldn’t park near the dorms, but the walk to the stadium parking lot wasn’t too bad. </p>
<p>School was 3 hours from home, so it made trips to/from school for holidays much easier (no planes/trains possible). </p>
<p>I lived and went to school in Texas, so that may explain the whole car thing, but almost everyone had a car. We used them to go to church, to haul laundry to an off campus laundromat with more machines (so you could do all your laundry at once), to go study at the local pancake house, to hit a movie theater the night before school started, and to do Christmas shopping, among other things. They were mostly used on weekends.</p>
<p>S had his car at school and loaned it out to a friend. It hadn’t occurred to us that he might do that, so we hadn’t discussed it, but when we found out we told him we did NOT want him loaning the car out. He replied, “Well I won’t be loaning out to <em>friend</em> again anyway. He left the window partly down and didn’t tell me, and it poured rain that night.” UGH.</p>
<p>S will not be taking his truck to school, at least not now. I want to see some grades first. Also, he’ll only be 50 miles away and I don’t want him running home every weekend, or making road trips to other schools to visit his friends. He doesn’t need that temptation right out of the box.</p>
<p>^My sentiments exactly…plus if your child joins a frat they will become the ‘designated driver’ for the other frat members. While it helps ensure your child won’t be drinking, they will be at the fraternity’s beck and call day and night. One of my son’s friends said he spend $2,000 in gas last year when he was a pledge driving around frat members. We’ve decided to wait to see if son joins a fraternity before sending the car.</p>
<p>We have limited experience but wouldn’t have to set minimum GPA’s. ShawSon is intensely competitive. That includes grades. His school wouldn’t allow freshman to have cars, but if a car would make a big difference, we would be open to letting the kid have one. In his case, he is in an extracurricular activity in which the kids drive to other schools and he is VP of operations or something like that, so he may take a car to school this year. He has no experience taking care of a car, which does worry us. Generally he doesn’t worry about the material world unless we specifically instruct him to take care of something, in which case he is excellent. [His approach is that you pick an extremely limited number of things to focus his energy on and ignore all others.]</p>
<p>ShawD knows that grades matter but minimum GPA would make her anxious and anxiety actually diminishes her performance. Haven’t thought about a car for her. It depends upon where she goes to school. In general, without a really good reason, I think it is an unnecessary distraction.</p>
<p>Our insurance is actually lower if the kid is listed as being on his/her own beater car rather than our nicer ones.</p>
<p>Any other parents with experience wish to weigh in?</p>
<p>I recently found evidence that my daughter was drinking the first week of school ( dated photos on her ipod). I have not yet decided how exactly to handle it- but I discussed it with my therapist. ( he thought I should be low key- but I want to make boundaries clearer)</p>
<p>emeraldkitty, is this the first week of college or HS? If college, I suspect that other than the ultra-cautious and the deeply religious, most kids will drink sometime in their first month of college. It’s the Puritanistic attitude we have in the US about alcohol – we try to ban it, which in general has not worked, and seems to encourage binge drinking. It is the forbidden fruit and kids who haven’t been drinking in HS will experiment early in college. IMHO, the drinking age should be 18. Works in Quebec, where binge drinking is said not a common occurrence at McGill.</p>
<p>Was she driving when she was drinking?</p>
<p>Grades – Depends on the circumstances. My son attends a reach college with an insanely difficult curriculum. He came from a good high school for normal (read, not on CC) kids, and his high school preparation was nothing like that of his college peers. This became clear in his first semester. Expecting him to carry his 3.9+ unweighted high school record to a college where under 10 students have graduated with 4.0 GPAs in its entire history would have been unreasonable. He’s motivated enough to do the best he can, and he has a plan that he put together to keep his merit scholarships. My role now is purely supportive and encouraging. He knows that it’s all up to him, but that I’m firmly in his camp and cheering him on every chance I get.</p>
<p>Car – My son’s freshman class was the last one allowed to take cars to his college. I had been dead set on geek_son taking a car; then my mom talked some sense into me and I asked him whether he actually wanted to take the car. He thanked her profusely and told me, Heck NO! With a car come parking and maintenance, along with insurance costs of course. As it turned out, he hardly ever had time to go off campus anyway, and he could always find a ride when he needed one. In the meantime, he’s racking up a perfect “driving record” for the insurance companies. He may pick up a small car in his junior year so he can get around the area for Clinic and be one of the friendly upperclassmen who drive others to the airport.</p>