The bottom line is that admission decisions for transfer students aren’t out yet, so her daughter couldn’t have been rejected. The OP came back and chose not to address that fact.
An adviser is telling her why her daughter was rejected when they haven’t released decisions yet? An adviser where? Can’t be Berkeley. Her CC? And she’s believing them, but would never send her daughter to Northridge because she heard (from some unknown source) that the advisement is terrible there?
Anyone want to buy a bridge in Brooklyn? I’ll give you a great price.
Most successful CC transfers take 3 years, not two.
“Normal” undergraduate age is seen as 18-24. Even official publications include these numbers.
UC’s tend to be cheaper than CSU’s because their financial aid package includes housing costs and they’ve got better financial aid.
Advising at CC is not topnotch - there may be one list of CC requirements, one list of CSU requirements, and one list of UC requirements, and some advisers don’t check all three.
Note that the adviser who shared that information with you could be in trouble for doing such a thing. Since decisions aren’t out, wait till you hear back and don’t force your child to attend a CSU if she has a shot at Berkeley.
There’s no reason to punish your daughter since she got a great GPA and could get into a UC with just one more semester, something virtually all parents would be really proud of. Celebrate your daughter’s drive and smarts. You must be proud to have such a resourceful, intelligent child.
@Marian, I think you’re onto something here. This smells to me like the kind of parent who says to their 5-year-old kid “you’re sitting at the dinner table until you finish all your broccoli!” and then literally makes their kid sit there all evening. Anyone have a parent who did that to them? Did that get you to eat broccoli in the future?
OP, your daughter isn’t a 5-year-old refusing to eat her broccoli. She’s not going to “learn a lesson” from this, other than the lesson that she has an unreasonable mom who cares more about forcing her to do something than about what’s actually best for her in life. “Punishing” her for making mistakes in her transfer requirements is pointless and won’t do anybody any good – and in fact it could do your relationship with her a great deal of harm, as others have pointed out.
I agree with those who have said: if your problem with her plan is that you simply don’t want to spend the money for UC tuition, then that’s perfectly reasonable. If that’s the case, then tell her so. She’s more likely to forgive you for that than for simply stomping your foot over some stupid, arbitrary requirement that she take no more than 4 years to finish college.
@dustypig, I did the “sit at the table for hours” thing with my daughter when she wouldn’t finish her milk as a preschooler. We did it every day for months, and she often sat at the table from the end of one meal to the beginning of the next. (I would replace the old milk with new milk every 2 hours so there wasn’t a food safety issue, and I would “not notice” that she sneaked away and brought toys to the table.) It didn’t work. She never drank the amount of milk the pediatrician insisted she should have.
I knew no other way to try to get the milk into her, and I felt desperate because there’s a strong family history of osteoporosis. I consider my inability to get her to drink milk one of the greatest failures in all my years of parenting. My only consolation is that by the time she develops osteoporosis, I’ll be dead and I won’t know about it.
It’s possible that the OP feels every bit as desperate about responsibility at college as I did about milk. And I can understand that. But my approach to trying to get my daughter to drink enough milk didn’t work. I don’t think the OP’s approach to her daughter’s issue will accomplish what she wants, either.
The mom is wrong on virtually every point she’s made. Her points in her first post are weak, and her follow up post with “more explanation” is even worse!
The UCs give better aid. There are many low income students at UCs because they do give better aid!
Long, sorry.
Early, I suspected things about this thread and said we’d need more info. Maybe there is some ruse here. The comments about age and CSUN are odd. Yes, looks like UCB won’t release til later this month.
But, when do parents hold their kids accountable? Especially, when it’s big? Can we imagine this may not be a jealous, dictating, vindictive mom, but one who’s ‘up to here’ with a flakey kid? Maybe there’s a kid history of minimal follow through, last minute saves, “plans” left to chance, Holy Marys on grades, etc. Just citing comm coll grades isn’t enough to tell she’s a responsible sort.
I can’t get past that the UC requirements are spelled out. This kid didn’t meet them, in several ways (not one fluke or a change in policy. Seems she even counted repeated classes toward the minimums.) We don’t know she was “mis-advised.” Nor that she ever sought that advisement until now. It’s all after-the-fact, last minute. In fact, we don’t even know that the kid ever checked the requirements until time to apply. And then crossed her fingers, hoped for a save.
We don’t know there’s a plan for the D to pay for extra cc time. In fact, the only “plan” seems to be a “dream.” And one not managed. And I think that, because the dream is Berkeley, a superior school, it clouds things, even in our eyes. (What if her only option turns out to be a lesser UC she doesn’t want?) And so on.
Sure, mom may be flakey, too. But why this mess, in the first place? If this were a motivated, responsible kid…
Though they might tell the CC advisors before they tell the students – especially in cases like this that reflect miscommunication during advising. That would be helpful feedback for the CC people.
I’m more forgiving to the DD for overlooking or not understanding what’s needed. Big publics, including community colleges, don’t always have the best help/advising, and missteps are common.
We’ve seen enough kids here on CC who’ve made missteps. We’ve seen rising college seniors suddenly realizing that they’re missing a req’t to graduate.
The mom just seems irrational. Nearly every argument the mom presents isn’t true, or just doesn’t justify her stance.
Even her initial demand that her DD must transfer after 2 years or quit school is irrational.
Her idea that her DD will somehow benefit now by doing things “mom’s way,” is just self-serving and controlling.
Unless the mom has a strong income (over $80k), then the DD is going to get a LOT of aid going to a UC. The argument that CSU’s are cheaper falls flat when a UC is going to give you free tuition. A CSU isn’t cheaper if you’re getting free tuition from a UC.
I think that the mom needs to focus on her own unhappiness, frustrations, and missed goals.
However, when she was applying, I made her apply to all of the CSU schools in-case she didn't get into any of the UC's, and she got into all of those CSU's, and it's a good thing I did
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The MOM is saying that it’s a good thing she had her DD apply to CSUs.
To some extent, OP sounded like some older relatives who felt I should only apply to the local public colleges because of low cost, perceived high academic rep*, and my lowish HS GPA.
They weren’t happy when they found I was attending a respectable private LAC despite the fact the near-full ride FA/scholarship package actually made it much more affordable/cost effective than attending the local publics would have in the mid-'90s…and that’s before accounting for my LAC’s much stronger academic environment.
The last was only underscored by several HS friends who ended up transferring up** of the local publics after a year or two because they grew fed up with bureaucratic red tape which prevented them from taking advanced classes at their academic level and being stuck in environments where the administration prioritized the needs of remedial/mediocre students vs the academically above-average students.
This was from outdated notions from a period when those public colleges were academically elite and had competitive admissions policies to match. By the time I was a HS senior, they had reached their academic nadir before reforms at the end of the '90s/early '00s dramatically turned them around.
** They finished at academically elite privates such as Reed, CMU, Columbia, etc.
“Accountable” would be telling the kid that mom can’t pay for a 3rd year of CC, and/or that kid cannot continue to live at home, but that mom is willing to subsidize a CSU. Then the student would have a choice: either take up mom’s offer to attend a CSU and live on campus, or find a job locally and pay for her own college & housing costs.
But this parent isn’t giving the kid a choice – she is trying to actively prevent her D. from pursuing a goal she doesn’t like.
I know where the mom is coming from because I faced the same situation when my son dropped out of college at age 20. I knew I had to draw clear boundaries and I did. I told him I would pay for 2 more years of college, but that they had to be completed within the next 3 years. In year #4, the mommy scholarship would have expired. Son chose to run out the time – he got a job, moved out, worked for 3 years, and then transferred to a CSU on his own dime. There was no angst or argument – I was completely supportive emotionally of son’s choices. I don’t think he worried about it because he liked his job and in the end the money he got from his employers was more than he could have expected from me.
I don’t think anyone is asserting that the mom is unreasonable on the financial end of things – it’s the rest of the picture that’s a problem.
Do we even know if mom is funding the CC?? The student may be Pell eligible and BOG eligible. Even if BOG is limited to 2 years, if the DD is willing to pay for the 3rd year, then fine.
BTW…it doesn’t sound like DD needs 3 quarters at her CC (sounds like SBCC). Sounds like she could be done by Christmas since she’s only missing a few classes, that may be complete in 1 quarter… If so, she could work after that until her UC time in Fall 2018.
BTW…can the DD complete these missing classes over the summer? If so, she could spend fall and spring working.
DD will need to apply in the fall to transfer to a UC.
There are three quarter system CCs in California. The two larger ones are in an area that has a tiger parent stereotype around it, whether or not the density of tiger parents actually is higher there than on other places.
