So what are those parents supposed to do exactly when they’re hundreds of miles away? I am not going to cut of my kid’s tuition because they confessed (perhaps many months later) that they got a fake ID.
For us, college is about more than an academic education - it’s about learning the consequences of your actions, and my kid would have likely learned more if they’d been ticketed and fined for a fake ID, than mommy and daddy cutting off their college tuition and they have to move back home.
My parents were of the type that told me, “You do this, that, or whichever, and your college education is over.” Let me tell you far that went in deterring me from ever developing a mature, adult-level relationship with them… zilch - as I got older, I learned, to them, it was more about what others would think of them if their snowflake had strayed, as opposed to really being able to sit down and talk about why certain choices were bad. Of course, as I got older, I also learned (not from them) they had some pretty serious secrets themselves.
Us? We want to be able to have conversations with ourr kids, in a manner that keeps the door open, as opposed to condemning them and cutting them off for making mistakes. So far it’s worked pretty well - we have much better relationships with our kids than our parents did with us.
It’s not black or white, we can make our opinions known very clearly, but once they’re out of that door, it’s pretty much a crap shoot. I’m sure every person on this thread can name several families where the parents were dire-hard, hard liners with discipline, yet they had kids who screwed up big time with either pregnancies or drugs/alcohol. And yea, it even happens at the rigid evangelical colleges where every piece of clothing, haircut, piercing is monitored.