There are many, many places that would not result in a student bring $50,000 in debt after a shoddy freshman year. Pick a regional state university or a community college with a transfer agreement.
"College costs $200k in debt" just isn't true nationally (average is around $40k) and the discourse being set by the private school nyt set is damaging. Spending $50k to take high school courses again isn't a great use of funds, but "college isn't worth it" leads to defunding state schools. Because it's not worth it. Even if yearly tuition is $8000 before aid.
Anyhow her kid probably doesn't have unusual ennui. He just partied and figured he'd be fine because he had an easy schedule. Then he dug himself a hole by the midterms.
"What happened?? What HAPPENED?? But what HAPPENED??," with varying degrees of emotion and intensity and voice-breakage, roughly twenty times.
That just shuts people down. You can berate them enough to get an answer if they are timid or you are especially threatening, but the answer is just what they think you wanted to hear.
1: I think one thing that's unusual is that he failed two semesters instead of just one, without telling his parents.
2: I think she knows it wasn't ideal...
I'd want to rule out something like depression before assuming he was just partying a lot.
First-year or first-semester Pass/No Record (ABC/DF), as I had it, seems like it was a good idea - allow you to adapt to the new environment and/or the different level of the material without it eventually being a big deal.
I feel like I can't judge the kid -- that sort of thing was how I spent most of my college education, and kind of why I switched majors and schools to something where collapsing completely except to show up for tests and papers with some kind of attempt would get me Bs. But I plausibly would have been doing the same sort of thing even if I wasn't capable of half-assing my way through with a certain degree of success.
3: maybe? But this is also something I see all the time, and more so post pandemic. Students come in relatively academically accomplished (sometimes even with college credit), but they have no experience with managing their own time educationally. And the pandemic exacerbated this because for good reason, no one in high schools was reinforcing things like deadlines and often allowing "extra credit" to make up for an entire term's work.
The problem is that these patterns are disastrous in college. Even if you get a very lenient prof, there's just no way to do all of your work in the last week of the semester. And if you're in upper division classes because dual enrollment meant you didn't need to take Gen Eds, you've now bombed an upper division class (harder to repeat, harder to recover.).
Universities are figuring out how to deal with less prepared students but the challenge is how to give them metacognitive skills besides the usual way, which is the way Edward discovered.
Yeah, I really have no idea how to teach time management besides, "It sucks because you have to do less-fun stuff when you want to do more-fun stuff."
This was basically me my first year of college, including losing a scholarship, and in my case it was because I was having so much fun after four years of being at a high school I hated.
It isn't clear from the post whether they've considered this option at all. I would have been so pissed if my parents forced me into therapy because I was doing poorly in school because I was happy for the first time in a long time. There are practical concerns with partying too much in that it doesn't make sense to pay for school for someone who is failing, but the intervention for that kid is pretty different than what's required for a kid who is depressed.
6: this is another debate, actually. Good pedagogy says: give lots of small assignments to reduce test anxiety and ensure no one assignment determines the semester. In practice: it works well for diligent students who are anxious, but the slackers who are decent test takers are now mathematically screwed. I have no idea what the right model is here.
4: me too, but his answers are: the classes were easy and boring and his roommate was in the phone too much, and his mom's first reaction was therapy. So he's likely going to have that end explored and I'm just proposing a common alternative: he's a bright kid with poor metacognitive skills, possibly also enjoying his first taste of freedom.
Here's a thing I go in circles on:
I think the novelty of living on your own and learning to budget, have freedom, etc is much better suited to a grunt-work job. It's easier to manage your time with a minimum-wage job than with the independence of college courses.
Then once you have your sea legs for adulthood, and your job at The Gap gets boring, you apply to college. Obviously people sometimes do this, but it's not seen as the mainstream path.
But if it were the mainstream path, you run into a few major problems:
1. Pregnancy. It's just easiest to get school out of the way before people start having babies. If it were standard to delay 2-3 years, a certain portion will get derailed by pregnancy and having financial dependents.
2. Losing your momentum. It's hard to go from a modest salary to super broke, especially once you've got a much better understanding of what it takes to pay back loans.
3. Really long educational paths, like med school. Kids who know for sure they want to be a doctor are not going to want to wait a few extra years. But as soon as one ambitious group heads off to college after high school, that sets the tone for showing that you're an ambitious go-getter, and so the paradigm crumbles.
But in so many ways, I think the norm should be for kids to master living independently and holding a minimum-wage job, and then later bring in college courses.
The US system where parents are paying a lot of money but students are supposed to be learning how to be independent and have significant privacy rights is such a mess. Of course if parents are paying tens of thousands of dollars they want to know if their kids are failing and they want to decide thier kid's major. But then what is the point of college anyway if they're not learning independence and making their own decisions and mistakes?
(I mean, I know the rhetorical answer to "But then what is the point of college anyway if they're not learning independence and making their own decisions and mistakes?" It's to get on the path to financial solvency.)
Anyway, I'm two weeks out from driving our son to his first year of college.
7 is really well put, and I agree with all of it.
I wonder to what extent this kid was learning to manage their own time in high school. In principle kids should be learning more and more independence while they still have the safety net of being at home, but in practice it seems like a lot of parents just do that stuff for their kids and then they're not ready at all for college.
Right, but the problem with 15 is why do employers want college graduates? It's genuinely unclear to me. I would have thought that they wanted students who learned independence, but they don't seem the least bothered by universities doing everything they can to make everyone graduate.
They want kids who know how to act UMC and blend in class-wise. You might get that otherwise, but it takes more sifting.
18: when only 6% of people had college degrees, it was a pretty good filter for high intelligence and metacognitive skills, plus sometimes they also learned useful information in college. When 38% have degrees, it's less useful as a filter. A lagging indicator?
12: it's not seen as the mainstream path, but it's more common than four years in Bucolic SLAC, and the risks are as you describe.
I just don't believe 19, you can very easily get that info from high school.
I hear good things about going to a bucolic SLAC though.
He's completely prepared to join the MA legislature where almost all business is done in the last 3 days of a 2-year session.
I just don't believe 19, you can very easily get that info from high school.
True, I suppose. But while you could get that kind of thing from high school, the kind of person who fits that vibe is not on the job market after high school. It's kind of chicken-and-egg.
It used to be that a college degree was a good way to signal "won't try to start a race war, at least not openly." I'm not sure that works anymore.
It signifies "was finally able to sit through stupid Computer Programming 101 for the third time and comply with inane assignments like the kind they'll be doing at this job."
Now 27 I agree with, but it sure doesn't seem like parents (the paying customers!) or the management class at universities agree at all!
Surely high school, in its classical form, is a parade of inane assignments, even more so than college. And more tailored to habits for full-time jobs given attendance requirements.
28 was really meant to say I agree with 27.1
I've never had a full-time permanent job that didn't require, on a daily basis, skills that I learned in graduate school or college.
32: The age this kid will be when he graduates.
We had access to our son's grades. He had to give us permission every semester, and he did so without argument.
It's really bugging me that the permission expired before I got a look at his final semester, but I have been able to confirm that he did, in fact, graduate in May, so that seems good enough.
29: but high school is required, and completion levels are high, so it's weak signal.
"What zip code were you raised in?" would work fine, but be too explicit in revealing the goal.
I think the novelty of living on your own and learning to budget, have freedom, etc is much better suited to a grunt-work job. It's easier to manage your time with a minimum-wage job than with the independence of college courses.
Then once you have your sea legs for adulthood, and your job at The Gap gets boring, you apply to college. Obviously people sometimes do this, but it's not seen as the mainstream path.
This is basically what our twins are doing (though they're still living at home for now). They're just working crappy retail jobs but doing really well at them. We're pretty happy with how it's going so far.
Anyway, I think Cala's right that the most likely answer is that this kid took easy classes and partied, and that's why he doesn't want to tell his parents the full story.
If his parents spent high school monitoring him closely and lecturing him if he got a B, this is a way to flip that narrative.
Is it though? Doesn't seem like their reaction has changed at all.
They won't complain about Bs maybe.
Edward has multiple health issues that require extensive treatment so that might have been an issue in terms of time management/distraction. Judging from how Swistle describes her family gaming seems more likely than partying.
I think the novelty of living on your own and learning to budget, have freedom, etc is much better suited to a grunt-work job.
I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and soon thereafter dropped out of college. I spent two years in restaurant jobs before going back. It all turned out fine for me -- but it was a hard experience. I wouldn't recommend that path to anyone.
31: I want to say that I never had a full-time job that required anything that I learned in college or graduate school. That's only a slight exaggeration, I think. Maybe I'm a special case, as someone that went to library school just before the internet and the web became ubiquitous.
31: I think UPETGI is asking why jobs as administrative assistants prefer an English or history graduate to someone with a high school diploma only. My grandfather had only a high school diploma. He was offered a small scholarship to Cornell but didn't go because of the Depression.. He did fine job-wise, worked as a controller and VP of contracts for a defense contractor. The big company he worked for had a training program and felt that a bright high school graduate was a strong enough candidate for an entry-level Job. What is it that makes companies unwilling to do this now?
Don't know. Did your grandfather embezzle?
49: Actually, he was remembered for his extraordinary honesty and integrity. He wa since at a meeting where another company hinted that they could all make extra money by skismming some off the top. He promptly ended the meeting and said they were not interested in doing business with that group.
I think he would have benefited in his thinking about the world if he'd had a liberal education, and all 4 of his kids went to college, but professionally he did fine.
Our eldest blew up at his first college twice and lost an academic scholarship along the way. Different details not worth the effort to describe, but not completely unexpected. I think it is very hard to generalize about these things at anything other than a very high-level (move from home environment and academic context A to away-from-home and academic context B can trigger many sorts of failure and/or extremely suboptimal results). Also left me a bit sensitive to attempted critiques of parental responses--we have many second guesses of ourselves to this day but not clear what if anything would have led to a better outcome. I had strongly suggested a year off but my kid aggressively rejected that.
While we twiddle our thumbs and wait for Harris to name her pick for VP,
I might suggest a thread going up to discuss it today so we can all make asses of ourselves before the event.
I will say (and this would be better to discuss in that thread...) that the drama and the veepstakes make me feel completely vindicated* about not wanting a Thunderdome convention scenario for the prez pick. The levels of performative butthurt that will potentially come out from this are sobering and one can imagine how heightened that would have been for the actual candidate pick.
*I was pretty damn wrong on thinking Biden could continue to run; although it was the fear of the Thunderdome that in retrospect partly led me to that delusion.
52: I proposed a Veepstakes post this morning to heebie, then realized it's sort of been in another post. But it couldn't hurt. Maybe two people constitutes a groundswell at this point.
I am very curious about the extent to which Edward's pre-college years featured increasingly-sophisticated levels of responsibility -- or not.
My observation is that there is extremely wide variation among parents, in that some parents seem to believe in a binary child/adult phenomenon, where you are a child at home and then magically -- poof! -- when you leave for college you become an adult. Other parents believe in a spectrum of adulthood, where you gradually take on more independent responsibilities as your teen years go on.
My bias is strongly toward the latter, and I don't *think* that just because it worked well for me personally. You need lots of lower-stakes and medium-stakes opportunities to do things on your own (and sometimes screw up! and learn how to react to screwups!) before you are suddenly plunged into the higher-stakes realm.
Mixed age schooling would fix this.
55: That was the route that my Dad took. Over high school, we became responsible for shares of laundry and meal prep, which went a long way to making dorm/apartment easy to handle. High school academia didn't prepare me for the step up of college, though I recovered after a few weeks. I sympathize with those who took longer to find their sea legs.
My policy of letting my children grow up feral on the streets of NY worked out well that way. I taught them how to make a decent cocktail, but beyond that it was mostly 'root, hog, or die."
55: completely, completely agreed. It's not that the college students aren't responsible, but for a lot of them it's the first time without any kind of safety net. And it's really easy for parents to not helicopter exactly, but minimize the downsides of low-stakes failure. Kids don't get a lot of independent playtime, and school pushes their assignments to parents' phones. So they get used to offloading metacognition onto Mom and Dad and then it's just... gone.
It's hard to solve. The kids have activities. That's supervised, but it also eats up time. They have playdates, but they're never far away from parental oversight. The parents aren't doing anything wrong! But it's not optimal to have your first big fuckup be at college instead of middle school.
I'm kidding about how very feral my kids were, but I really did abandon them to manage their own academic lives pretty young. We talked about stuff a lot, and I was interested in their work and their teachers, but I never kept any organized track of what they were supposed to be working on and when. I'm sort of surprised that's not commoner.
48: having a high school diploma doesn't signify what it used to, independently of the educational quality or lack thereof. When your grandfather finished high school, many contemporaries had dropped out.
62: it is for me! But I see the downsides. I tend to talk with them about what needs to be done and how to manage time (are you going to want to miss skiing to do the book report?) and let them figure it out.
I did tiger mom the hell out of the recent piano recital, however.
62: Kid Three thinks I take too long to re-learn math so I could help her and just figures it out on her own. Everything else she manages. She'll have a big end-of-HS paper due before Christmas, and I do inquire about her plans for that. Not that they are terribly concrete yet; the Taylor Swift concert was just last week or so.
Anyway One is about to start his exchange year in Norway, and Two is in the second half of her volunteer year that's supposed to improve her chances of getting a slot for medicine in Berlin. We'll see.
Middle school was when they basically took over academic management. We're fortunate that they're sufficiently neurotypical to be able to do that. Downside to the hands-off approach: I didn't learn how barely Kid One passed senior math until that was a done deal. On the other hand, he buckled down and passed his major's weed-out statistics exam once he got to college, so something worked.
I hope the major was okay with that.
12
But in so many ways, I think the norm should be for kids to master living independently and holding a minimum-wage job, and then later bring in college courses.
That's not exactly what I did but seems related. I got accepted to college on the usual schedule, i.e. during my senior year of high school, but deferred admission for a year to study abroad. I attended a year of high school in France and lived with host families. I had already graduated from high school so I didn't have to worry too much about formal school stuff, but was still expected to attend and get passing grades, and had a lot more freedom than I had at home. Then I went to college, a year after my high school classmates but otherwise indistinguishable from them.
This requires a certain amount of funding and a second language, but I had a lot of fun and learned a few things about independence I wouldn't have otherwise.
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Well fuck me sideways.
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina flees, army says interim government to be formed
This is developing into a hairy year for the gerontocracy.
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52/54: sorry! I've been out of pocket. But will do!
There are many, many places that would not result in a student bring $50,000 in debt after a shoddy freshman year. Pick a regional state university or a community college with a transfer agreement.
This is only somewhat true, namely living at home and/or getting scholarships. The state U in heebieville estimates $30k/year, which isn't $50k but is still higher stakes than I want to dump on some scatterbrained semi-responsible 18 year old for screwing up.
There's a picture of a guy plundering a large fish from the residence of the deposed PM of Bangladesh. Makes me want to learn more.
UC Davis law school is now $50k per year. Probably more than some private ones with aid packages.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/23/bangladesh-protests-unrest-political-crisis-democracy-sheikh-hasina/
(Does not explain fish.)
"the norm should be for kids to master living independently and holding a minimum-wage job, and then later bring in college courses."
The issue here is that it would be a huge economic drag, almost as bad as conscription, because you're saying to every skilled worker that they don't get (say) 40 years of being a high value added skilled worker, they get 36 years of high value add and four years of shelf stacking.
And, really, is it necessary? Don't most adults who attend college manage a fairly smooth transition from school to college to employment?
Most do. Many are struggling now. Part-time work in high school imo makes more sense than delaying college. What you're after is having to do something without your parents riding you.
So long, and thanks for the big fish.
66: There was a colonel of truth in it.
Other plunder apparently included live cattle. I guess the lady just had a healthy appetite.
55 and 75 both make sense. If you're going to launch your kids out into the world, then you need to be sure they're ready to be launched.
I do wonder if the current generation is really abnormally fragile - certainly we've had briefings in work on How To Manage Gen Z, which do make it sound like they're all on the verge of collapse. But then that's what every generation has thought about its juniors. This House would not fight for king and country, and so on.
63: Yes, and to some extent graduating from high school was a filtering mechanism. Surely, we could find other filtering mechanisms.
The pandemic as a formative developmental experience does make sense for a cohort turning out to be unusually fragile.
Googling the "How To" phrase in 79 turned up a bunch of stuff aimed at Millennials as managers, and guess who's getting ignored again? That, as much as anything, made me look forward to when Gen Z will get their own nickname. What with being old enough to remember when the Millennials were either Gen Y or just our younger siblings.
I generally hate Kids These Days sentiment, but it seems more plausible than usual for the pandemic cohort.
I was thinking that until we see some Drop/Fail/Withdraw data from the 70s onward, we should take Kids These Days things with a grain of salt.
I've been backing up old blog entries, and I was roughly equally gobsmacked by my students inability to understand logic back in 2010.
(However, I do think that kids that took algebra remotely faired particularly badly in math. But maturity-wise, I think we're just about past the effects of Covid. The kids that stayed home in middle school are back to normal by college.)
This only gives dropout rates going back to 2012.
MC, I could post a Bangladesh thread if you pointed me towards something.
Ok how's this: an indefinite period of training for high value added skilled employment, AND underpaid grunt work *at the same time*?
Although the title of this thread is very appropriate, actually.
86: Whoopsy-daisy, somehow that period just ended.
The data I've seen suggests significant learning loss from fourth grade onwards. (Nothing magical about fourth grade; that's just where the studies started.) It's worse for kids in poorer districts, but even in Utah, which really shut down only for the spring of 2020, the pandemic was disruptive. I think it's less that school was closed and more that nearly every routine was disrupted, but also online school for a lot of kids meant "just cheat and turn it in late."
At the level of anecdote, kids who were fourteen or fifteen when the pandemic happened basically lost a lot of independence at a time where they normally get it. No hanging out with friends; activities are shut down; not taking on jobs; and really not sure what to do socially because there's a lot of growth between 14 and 16 which didn't happen in the usual way.
I was very pushy about someone getting out of the fucking house because I know of what you speaking l speak.