<p>I’m going to try to answer your original question. You provided a ton of information in the first post (which is what people responded to and also what I focused upon), and it was actually hard for me to notice what you were asking (which only became somewhat clearer in your subsequent response): </p>
<p>If your son is looking at graduate school in terms of an academic path (vs. a professional degree, such as MD, Law etc.), I can offer up that in my experience, we really wouldn’t care what is on the transcript (whether it says medical leave, suspension etc.). We would care very much about the GPA, but fortunately (for your son), not in a quick glance overall sense but rather in a more detailed way: how one did in critical courses, and more advanced courses (that related to the field s/he wants to enter), and how it all hang together with other aspects of his application. </p>
<p>Graduate school (of the kind I’m most familiar with) is a very small numbers game (unlike say graduate professional schools or undergrad school application process). We talk to professors who worked with students, who wrote them letters, we read letters, we talk to prospective students. In that process, we would come to understand why a student might have a bad year, or a missed year, and take that into account. I think that is one great thing about the process- that we can delve deeper- and in that sense the system can be more ‘forgiving’, if you will. </p>
<p>That being said, if your son is able to get the help he needs and improve his grades, demonstrate he has what it takes on key courses in more senior level work, get involve in research, get to be known by his faculty members, get high standardized test scores, that would go a long ways to help him get into grad school.</p>
<p>Just a thought, I don’t know if it applies in your son’s case, but another common problem that is getting to be more and more well known and understood as a reason related to academic failure (esp in the not going to class, lying and covering up etc.) is internet gaming addiction. See olganon.org for more details.</p>
<p>Utzybuzzy, did your son ever receive an Academic Caution, and was he ever placed on Academic Probation? Or did the Academic Advisory Committee go straight to suspension, based on this semester’s grades? </p>
<p>The reason I ask is because the Committee’s policy is to notify parents when students are placed in any of these categories, and when a probation is continued or changed. (I know because my younger son is at the same college as your son, and I have checked the website.) If you weren’t notified when you should have been, that is an issue that you could raise in your discussions with the college administration. </p>
<p>The website of your son’s college also has an entry on medical leaves of absence (MLOA), and there is nothing to indicate that the request has to be made at any particular time. But I’m not clear about your son’s grades – are they already on his transcript? It may be that a MLOA cannot erase grades that are already on the record, so a grad school would still see the low average. But regardless – you could point out to your son’s college that you had no notice that an MLOA had to be requested at a particular point in time. I see from another thread that your son asked you if he could take an MLOA back in September. If the college knew back then that your son was having difficulties (did you in fact meet with them, as you indicated you were considering?), you could argue that he is being penalized for trying to stick it out, even though he was struggling at the beginning of the semester.</p>
<p>But for an MLOA, your son would need to submit an application along with documentation from a treating healthcare professional. Would your son’s current treating healthcare professional – you said in the other thread that he is seeing someone off campus for medication management – be willing to provide this documentation? Or a healthcare professional at home who has diagnosed and treated his depression? (I would think depression would be enough to justify an MLOA, which avoids the problem that the GAD is currently a self-diagnosis.)</p>
<p>But even if you don’t succeed in getting the suspension changed to an MLOA, it does sound, from starbright’s post, that all is not lost as far as your son’s future plans. I think if he comes home and gets the treatment he needs, he could be in a much brighter place this time next year.</p>