Re #39
Why would the instructors even know who was a spring admit?
I liked the comment to the Post article “What would happen to the student who discussed putting a Glock to the head of an administrator?”
I have a pretty good idea he wouldn’t be writing pieces for the Post to publish to defend himself.
We weren’t talking about AVERAGE students. We were talking about students who were successful academically in high school, but whose parents provided organizational scaffolding: “Mom dragged him out of bed, Dad made him breakfast, and then one of them drove him to school because he missed the bus. … Mom made a big spreadsheet to track when his assignments were due and that Dad got him a summer internship at his office when the kid couldn’t manage to apply for a job…” And then this student crashes and burns when they get to college and no longer have this scaffolding.
And we then have to ask, why were the parents giving their 17-year-old kids the kind of help you’d usually give a six year old? If you look at this particular group of kids, you discover that most of them have disabilities. The parents didn’t give their kid all this help for no reason; the kid kept failing to do these things himself, despite years of parental teaching and nagging.
It’s great to be helpful and kind, but how do such students function in the real world? I’m certainly not going to give any work accommodations to them. I have a business to run.
I actually have an employee (not directly reporting to me) like the kid described above. He is quite competent when he shows up which a lot of times is at ten. He is willing to stay late when he shows up late. He hits deadlines if his manager checks in on him to keep him on track. Work is usually stellar when done. It is tolerated because he is in a tough to fill role. He’ll likely never be promoted and he is frustrated by that. This thread just made me think he might have this disability. That would explain a lot.
CF - we were talking about AVERAGE students without any disabilities, and their parents were over managing them. Again, not every post or thread is about your child. I am sorry you are dealing with it in your family, but there is no need to turn this thread into your own situation. I haven’t had to deal with it and I am certainly in no position to talk about what it is like. Let’s just leave it at that.
Badly. It’s hard to figure out what possible job is right for someone with executive function deficits, because they lack the basic skills that employers want from low-level employees even more than from higher-level employees.
It’s clear, therefore, that employers shouldn’t want to hire people with executive function deficits. But parents of kids with executive function deficits are stuck with them, and just saying “They’re going to be bad employees” doesn’t tell the parents how to make them better employees, or better students either.
Average students, with or without disabilities, are not given significant organizational scaffolding by their parents in high school. We were talking about the academically strong students at this college who, in high school, had organizational scaffolding from their parents, and who failed in college.
You say these students were being coddled unnecessarily by their parents, and they could easily succeed in college if someone spent a little time to teach them organizational skills. I say, there is a reason these kids got so much help from their parents while their peers didn’t. They’re not average students who just by chance never learned to get up in the morning, catch the bus, keep track of deadlines, apply for jobs. They didn’t learn those tasks because those tasks are much more difficult for them than for average students.
And you look at kids like that and say, “He’s smart! Why isn’t he doing the little things that are so easy?” The little things that are so easy for everyone else are not easy for him.
If a kid like that went to a therapist for help, he would not be urged to try harder to do the tasks he fails at (getting up early, keeping track of his deadlines) by himself. The therapist wouldn’t think that a few weeks of teaching him organizational skills would solve his problems, because it wouldn’t. He would instead be taught to rely on outside scaffolding: a coach, various devices and programs to do for him what he can’t do for himself.
In the past, men who had this difficulty, but who were able to produce stellar work when they got to it, were managed by wives and secretaries.
Some kids even without executive functioning issues need some time to adjust to a college schedule. I came from a family where everyone was up early and we ate breakfast together. There was no hand holding but it would have been pretty hard to oversleep because the house was abuzz with activity. I had a carpool to school (no bus) so it wasn’t really possible not to make it to school on time. My study schedule was extremely constrained because of required afternoon sports. Contrast that with a college schedule where one roommate might have an 8:00 class while the other can study until 3AM then sleep in until noon.
I’ve seen plenty of posts here from kids trying to figure out a way to get up in the morning without awakening the wrath of a roommate or trying to figure out how to eat on a budget with a limited meal plan. They’re not incompetent but they are having difficulty figuring things out. To push kid like this out in the first semester without giving them a bit of time and/or support seems wildly unfair to me.
Is this thread about this specific college?
Mount St. Mary U. admit stats: SAT CR 25 percentile: 410, 75 percentile: 510.
60% of students are Hispanic/Latino (the ones who have money for private college).
http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=mary&s=CA&ct=2&ic=1&id=119173
The college is almost all women. Very few males apply, and even though you’d think that the college would be bending over backward to accept men, the male applicants are accepted at a much lower level (63%) than female applicants (79%). It looks like a lot of the applicants don’t speak English as a first language, since the college requires TOEFL. It may be that the SAT scores don’t accurately reflect the students’ academic ability, if their English skills are not perfect.
If I were running a school like that, I would try to figure out how to help students stay in college, rather than looking for ways to throw them out. And if I had a few students with 1400 SATs but Cs and Ds in high school, I’d try to figure out ways to help them stay, because their high academic ability would make it more interesting for the rest of the students, and the teachers too.
@coolweather, That’s a different college. The one discussed in this thread is in Maryland, not California.
^ Oh. Thanks.
This is the one. Right?
http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=Mary&s=MD&ct=1+2+3&ic=1&id=163462
As a professor, I can’t imagine thinking this way. Any evidence?
^ Or, as an instructor, how the heck do I know who was admitted when? I barely know what year my students are in.
Where I teach there is a lot of information about the students which is available to them, to the faculty, to the advisors, etc. in an online database. While it doesn’t specifically indicate when someone was admitted, one could certainly infer from when they started taking courses.
Interesting. Instructors here only have access to their year standing (fresh, soph, etc) based on credits, their school, and their major.
I’m sure advisors have more but that’s all we get. (This is the same for both primary instructors and grad assistants.)
He was at Bain. That says just about everything to me. I worked at a company once where Bain came in to “consult.” The results were catastrophic. Layoffs, programs cut, morale tanked, and efficiency and effectiveness plummeted. Short term stock gains, long term bitterness.
So MSM is being Bained (as we called it) - but by bringing it on the inside. Horrible.
This may vary by institution and the types of students it primarily serves. UMich is an elite university in its own right and thus, is not likely to feel the need to provide the greater levels of information @sylvan8798 is describing or what my friends* received when teaching at directional 4-year public or 2 year community colleges.
- Got a glimpse of this not only from hanging around instructor friends while grading papers/exams and discussing concerns about their students, but also from having subbed 2 class sessions for one of them with the department chair's approval. Part of this was the instructor friend briefing me so I can account for the class' average academic level when preparing and giving my lectures while subbing for him.