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<p>Sorry, this is off-topic but it sure made me laugh. Crankbrook? Was this an intentional misspelling?</p>
<p>EmeraldKity, I wish he would consider Americorps, it would do him a world of good.</p>
<p>Blossom I agree about the job, NOW… enough of the excuses…</p>
<p>Maidenmom, my own frustration must be coming across…</p>
<p>Hanna, you are right, he doesn’t believe or respect us which is rather odd since there hasn’t been a time in his life we didn’t live up to what we said, this consequence however is obviously the most severe thus my conflict. </p>
<p>ClassicRockerDad, thank you for checking Naviance, I’m certain there are plenty of colleges that would accept our son however he only wants to apply where he has determined he should apply, only one is in the State and I’d say he’s a match but not a strong one. The three other schools range in price from 43-52K per year, and none of the schools would give him Merit Aid. I don’t want to beat him over the head over his grades, they are what they are, I can’t change them, but I can’t send him off knowing that he has no desire to work…</p>
<p>Classic, I believe I’m the poster who coined the phrase “love the kid on the couch.” It has since been used to support lots of ideas that I don’t agree with-- and many more that I do.</p>
<p>What I meant to say was, don’t think your chill, easy going, and possibly lazy kid is going to wake up tomorrow as a result of your constant nagging and decide he’s going to start a robotics club at school, or cure cancer, or take his doodles at turn them into a portfolio to submit to the New Yorker. Not going to happen. So don’t get angry or frustrated or beat yourself up- find something to love about this kid you’ve spawned.</p>
<p>Then- help that kid figure out his or her bliss. Whatever it is. If your kid hates calculus but loves to bake and wants to try out culinary school- help him figure it out. If your daughter hates her piano recital but loves to play the piano… well, there’s a message there. My point way back when (and still today) is that your nagging isn’t going to turn the kid on the couch into the award winning, speech giving valedictorian we all kinda/sorta think we should have been able to raise. Reality is far different- find something to love about the kid watching the Simpson’s marathon and then see if you can facilitate (not force, facilitate) his or her getting on the path to achieving what he/her wants to do in life.</p>
<p>People are more than the aggregate of their SAT scores and their grades. Not every HS senior is winning Intel and serving as their town’s “youth and violence” advocate, taking meetings with the governor and giving interviews on the steps of their HS. So don’t get frustrated that this is not who you have raised.</p>
<p>But to encourage a kid who hasn’t demonstrated strong study habits or a desire to get a college education or any interest in the adult world to drift along to college on the wave that carries everyone else? I don’t get that.</p>
<p>My own kid on the couch found his calling-- thankfully- and has a job he loves working for people he admires. Pays his taxes, been self supporting since a few weeks after college graduation. But we would not have financed an 8 semester boondoggle-- as much as we love him. He went to college when he demonstrated that he cared about taking advantage of the opportunities that would be there. (we never asked his grades; we never demanded that he maintain a specific GPA. Just that he take his academics and the extra curricular opportunities as seriously as we- his parents- needed to take our jobs in order to pay for college.)</p>
<p>I don’t hear this parent beating this kid over the head, Rockerdad. Kid is in school until 1 pm and doesn’t have a place he needs to be until dinner time??? Yikes. At a minimum, he could be shoveling snow for an elderly neighbor or doing grocery shopping for a housebound community member. Sounds like the opposite of beating over the head- perhaps a little closer to enabling.</p>
<p>To the OP, set a budget with this kid. Tell him the amount YOU parents are willing to spend per year. I will say…if you are spending $50K per year for the sibling, it might be hard to say no to this kid. But…the reality is that it’s your money he is planning to spend. You can put an upper limit on what you are willing to spend.</p>
<p>Having said all of that, this kid might actually be one who would benefit from a school on the Colleges That Changed Lives list…most are not bargains.</p>
<p>P.S. how is he “getting around” from 1-6 when he comes home?</p>
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<p>I was just pointing out that how one perceives SAT scores is very dependent on context. While OP’s S circle feels his score is impressive, there are many other HS environments where that same score isn’t really anything to write home about. </p>
<p>Judging by the OP’s description of her S, he needs to be told “That’s ok, but there are many many others just as good/better than you” as a reality check on his “just good enough attitude”. </p>
<p>Praising him while he has that mindset as argybargy advises tends to be counterproductive from what I’ve seen of parents who praised undergrad classmates for -B or C level grades/GPAs. Doing so will only give him more reason to slack because “It’s just good enough”.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is just about his grades or scores. If he were TRYING HARD, that would be a different story. But the evidence is that he is not trying hard. And if he won’t try hard, why should his parents bust their tails to pay for an opportunity that he likely won’t try hard at as well?</p>
<p>We have a gifted child who tanked her first year of college and a high school senior on his way to hopefully being more successful. I understand the concerns of the OP but at the same time, in all fairness to your son, you need to be/have been clear about your expectations and the consequences of not meeting those, and as was suggested by another poster, it is really best to agree to those terms in writing. If your child has been led to believe all his life that college would be an option, you have to ask yourself if you are reneging on that offer and why. I am all for expectations and consequences, but I don’t think a young adult who is mellow and happy being a B student is a failure waiting to happen. He may not be the best he can be, but he is being the best he wants to be. I think you need to be very clear about what you do or don’t offer and give him a way to earn what he was led to believe he would be granted, if he was. It seems kind of late and possibly unfair to require that he have straight As, unless you have been irrefutably clear about that. I would rather suggest you set some clear thresholds going forward, from how he spends his free time, what grades he must have, and what expenses he is responsible for. You want to set him up to succeed, not penalize him for being less than a rocket scientist.</p>
<p>Many kids are not ready for college these days, more than generations before, due to the lack of social development which comes from too much screen time and not enough people time, and from impulsiveness and impatience they have developed, again, due to the impact of technology in their lives and being used to instantaneous responses and gratification. </p>
<p>On the other hand, being a B student who is comfortable with who he is is just not being a failure and you need to decide what kind of message you are sending if you tell him he doesn’t get to school because he hasn’t achieved a level he may not have realized you required.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why people suggest community college for a kid who is not ready for college. Community colleges should be a place for mature people to have a chance to complete higher education, not a place to babysit kids. Otherwise it’s a waste of tax payers’ money.</p>
<p>Kids who are not ready for college should go to work first then come back to college later. Army, Navy, Air Forces, Marines are also great places to start.</p>
<p>Honestly, I would insist on a gap year with employment. The attitude needs to change. And the partying definitely needs to stop before I would be financing four years of college. But parents have to be absolutely clear about their expectations and follow through with their decisions.</p>
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<p>I’m not so sure about that. Unlike nowadays where college is commonly viewed as the default option for high school graduates, that wasn’t the case just a few decades ago. Before the mid-'60s, college was commonly viewed as the option for scions of wealthy families and/or high academic achieving kids who graduated around the top 10-15% of their HS graduating classes. </p>
<p>Moreover, while many public colleges were extremely low cost/free, they were also extremely selective about admissions(pre-1969 CUNY) or had lax/open admissions…especially for in-staters, but also had systemic policies to weed out the academically un/underprepared or those unwilling to put in the required effort. Some older teachers, Profs, and parents of classmates who attended the “weed-out” public universities in the midwest recalled around 50% of their incoming freshman class would be weeded out by the end of their second year.</p>
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<p>But so what? The kid’s in HIS environment. It’s irrelevant what other people think. Pointing out that “people in advanced math and science environments think your SAT sucks” is just a) irrelevant and b) evidence of your continued fixation on what-they-think-at-Stuy.</p>
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<p>Comm colleges serve different purposes in different parts of the country. They may be solely the “older people who never had a chance for college to come back and finish their education” in your neck of the woods, but that’s not true everywhere.</p>
<p>Blossom, you are a wise parent… I think perhaps early on we were enabling, we figured he was happy, generally getting B’s seemingly a good kid, then the partying and all that came with it was upon us. We’ve taken away all creature comforts away but with just a very short time until he is 18 he realizes he’s in charge, and in fact he is. When he turns 18, well then we can call the shots as we always have. 17 is a difficult age for this type of problem…</p>
<p>Thumper, we really don’t know what he does until 6, but his mode of transport is his bike since we can’t trust him with the car… he was two weeks from getting his license when stuff hit the fan.</p>
<p>Dowzer, we’re covered, we always said we would help with college unless either child did one thing in particular and either child would have to get scholarship money. Well S did the ONE particular thing we said we would not tolerate and he got no scholarship money, he never even looked into it… It’s not like we set the bar so high it was unattainable. A 3.0 for scholarships is not unattainable, and had he taken a full schedule this year and worked his tail off he could have gotten to the 3.0 mark, the cutoff for most merit.</p>
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<p>No, it is NOT true that college was only for “wealthy people,” and it is NOT true that public universities in the midwest weeded out half their incoming classes. That bears no resemblance to the actual reality of the public universities in the midwest, despite some third-hand anecdote you heard from the-parent-of-a-friend-of-a-friend and decided to take to the bank. And who are we kidding? You don’t really know “scores” of people who attended public universities in the midwest who all talked to you about this very same topic – you heard it from one person and you extrapolated it.</p>
<p>Excuse me. I came from a poor, single parent household in the Midwest. I went to, and graduated from a public university in the Midwest state. In my major, virtually everyone who enrolled as a freshman graduated with me as a senior.</p>
<p>Let me guess…you either have cousins or friends who went to those Midwest schools.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - I think it’s a shame for distorting my words. I always know your attitude to my posts. Don’t start with my new year.</p>
<p>Maybe a “post-graduate” year at a boarding school? Those schools get “academic PGs” all the time and prepare them for college.</p>
<p>I’ve worked extensively with the archives at my midwestern U and cobrat, you’re wrong. At least for here.</p>
<p>^ ^</p>
<p>Pizzagirl,</p>
<p>Are you denying the fact that before the mid-'60s, admission to many elite private colleges…especially the Ivies was often just as much about who you know and what wealthy family you came from as your academic stats…and sometimes more so as a recent ex-president has illustrated? </p>
<p>I have an uncle who was admitted after Yale changed their admission policies to make it more based on academic merit and thus, in-line with current policies and he recounted the contrasting social gulf between upperclassmen admitted under the old system and underclassmen like himself who were admitted under the then new system. This is further confirmed by an article written in a Yale Alum mag some years back discussing the ramifications of those policy changes. </p>
<p>As for the high admission selectivity or easy admit/high weedout policies of public colleges of the period, they existed as a rational means to maximize the use of limited taxpayer provided educational dollars/campus capacity to ensure those institutions aren’t overwhelmed by aspiring students. Especially un/underprepared and/or those unwilling to put in the required effort.</p>
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<p>It seems like many people failed to notice I specified the period before the mid '60s or the possibility those from the lower SES could go to college…provided they were academic achievers near the top of their graduating HS classes.</p>
<p>Most of those policies were later dismantled due to the changing political climate of the mid-late '60s.</p>