I am the mom of a son who skated through college, doing just what he needed & nothing more. (12 years post graduation, he is a fully capable adult with a job he enjoys.) To me, your S sounds like he’s doing really well. He has friends, he’s involved in ways that matter to him, and he seems happy. He got into college, he’s on track to graduate, and he’s content. I’d consider that a win.
4 Likes
I forgot to address this.
I tried and tried to get my son to consider grad school. His first couple of years in college, he humored me by being non-committal. By his senior year, he was firm and direct: “Let me make this clear. Once I graduate, I’ll never take another class again!”
Of course, over the next few months I asked a few more times. His answer never changed and finally I got it. He was BA and done 
3 Likes
Our kid’s school has very detailed report cards with each core academic subject having 8-10 core strands listed. So there’s the overall grade for the class and then grades for each strand. All of that said, there is a more detailed set of grades for the social/behavioral aspects as well. The school calls them the community responsibility standards which are:
- respectful
- responsible
- safe
- problem solver
- following directions
- working hard and doing one’s best
That’s the section of the report card that I’ve repeatedly told my kid that I value most (not to say that my kid excels in all of those areas). My hope is that by focusing on being a good human that everything else in life will work out. I’ve seen plenty of examples of people who were (or wanted to be paired with those) who excelled academically or athletically, but then found that they were missing some of those key “community responsibility” traits, and that without those traits, it didn’t matter how stellar an individual was, they were not pleasant to be around or live with.
5 Likes
Most kids who are getting good grades are also pleasers. There are plenty of other attributes that contribute to their success, but at some level, they care about the appearance of doing well. They thrive on the positive feedback from others. That external validation matters.
People who aren’t motivated about that are, imho, pretty cool and also rarer. They do what pleases them. They can also be hard to parent or teach. They aren’t asking what else they can do for an A but how much less they can do and still get the B (so they have more time for what matters.) That’s also valid - chasing what matters to you, or at least not chasing what doesn’t!
Certainly, there are trade-offs. Good grades can open doors, have financial rewards, etc. But I applaud the kids who find a different path - and the parents that support them. Welcome back, @EconPop !
8 Likes
That was on my mind, too. I did not want to have one of those parent/adult-child relationship where there was tension. And I know that parent/minor-child tension doesn’t just fade away … it lingers when the minor child becomes an adult.
So, I started treating my son (and daughters) as responsible people, even if I thought they were not totally responsible as a fully mature person. I made sure I did not make demands on them. We had back-and-forth conversations, not one-sided directives. And I let them make decisions and we all lived with the consequences.
As I made many mistakes when I was a young person, and I lived with the consequences. That’s going to happen anyway. Better if it doesn’t happen amid me also creating a negative parent-child relationship at the same time
8 Likes
Once my kids started college, I became a sounding board when they wanted me to be … but I backed off otherwise. I did not ask about grades, social lives, etc. My D shared what she felt compelled to share, which wasn’t a lot, and my S shared very little. I always thought about my own college journey, my difficulties & triumphs, and how many mistakes I made along the way. I didn’t want to swoop in & try to fix my kids’ lives. I learned from my struggles, as did my kids.
2 Likes
The GPA data in the table comes from the latest year covered in the study, 2013, and is a mean not a median(median is often higher).
Median (and mean) GPA is way up since 2013. I believe UVA released theirs recently and it is 3.65. Duke’s is around 3.8(median), to be top 25% one must have a 3.94.
Most Ivies that have searchable data from 2022 or more recently show medians between 3.7 and 3.9(only two are that high). Cornell is lower.
1 Like
I think it is very useful.
While this thread opened with me talking about my son, I think it would be more helpful if parents of other average students talked about their students and their parental relationship with their students. Accounts of different familial situations, relationships, locales, outcomes, help us all get through our individual lives.
I, for one, greatly appreciate and enjoy your input.
7 Likes
Ah, well, you never know. My son also said he would “never do a master’s or anything like that.” Along comes the new girlfriend who suggested they prep for the GMAT together. They haven’t taken the test yet and I’m not sure they ever will, but pretty interesting to see how their plans evolve.
3 Likes
I swore I would never go to grad school. Years later I have two advanced degrees. I went back 5 years and 15 years later. My kid did well in high school at least partially due to external pressure, and middling well in college on her own. She says she’ll never go to grad school. We shall see.
ETA: my undergrad grades, which were very middling, didn’t stand in my way for grad school since they were far removed by the time I went. The first time I did take some classes as a non-matriculated student first to show I could do the work. The second time they only seemed to care about my graduate grades even though I got into a very competitive program notorious for caring about undergrad grades. Obviously not 15 years later.
3 Likes
Wow thanks for sharing your story. So much great stuff here - AMAZING! This is my second favorite ever CC post. (tops will always be the almost unbelievable multi-year saga of Thisisthais and MITChris…IYKYK). Really inspiring and super impressive…both dad and son. Congrats to both of you!
7 Likes
Thank you for the kind words!
I think a lot of this boils down to the old “parent the child you have” axiom. Like, I might wish my kid would care more about his grades, but that’s not his driver. So, having realized that, I think my next step as a parent is figuring out how to best maintain and strengthen our relationship going forward, while watching to see if there are any truly necessary guardrails or suggestions I can give him.
The truly necessary would be things akin to your financial independence tenet. It’s not really important to have a 3.0 in the grand scheme of things, so no real need to push in that area. It is really important to manage your physical, mental, and financial health - so maybe I push in those areas if I see something going awry. Finding the line between “ok mistakes” and “devastating mistakes” is going to be my goal.
Like, back to financial health - it’s not great, but not world ending, if he blows all or most of the money in his bank account. If he has to live on ramen for a while, ok, he can screw that up and deal with it and learn. It would be really bad, however, if he took on so much credit card debt that he can’t climb out from under it. Or, I know he’s a kid who needs people and physical activity to be happy. It’s ok if he’s gaming some of the time. It’s not ok if he’s only gaming and not interacting with people or getting outside for a walk or gym time.
I clearly can’t control these things, but if I’m going to point out areas of concern to him, I’m going to try to focus on only those kinds of things. He can be average student. He just needs to be healthy average student.
5 Likes
@EconPop - great thread, thanks. It is always good to be reminded that plenty of “normal average” people do very well. An old boss of mine used to say “enthusiasm makes ordinary people extraordinary” (not to say your son is “ordinary”) but it’s something we could well remind our kids.
-
On the side discussion of grades - my D19 is a great example that you can mess up a bit (or more than just a bit) in college and still ultimately be fine. She had a decent freshman year and then sophomore year was a disaster - partly covid, partly changing her major to something that wasn’t suitable - I don’t quite remember all the details but I do remember a D (possibly 2 Ds), 3 Ws, and 2 or 3 incompletes that turned into Fs. A semester off, on academic probation when she went back, a regroup, deans list the remainder of the time she was back. With that spotty record her grad school apps were always going to be reachy. Well, apart from the “safer” schools she got into (one of which offered her a PhD though she applied for masters), she also got into NYU, CMU, UChicago and Northwestern, and the only reach school that rejected her was Columbia. So to those parents right now worrying about grades… your kids can still be comeback kids! They’ll get there. Sometimes it takes time to find their way, and even if the path seems difficult now, it does not define them forever.
7 Likes
Although employers of new college graduates are less likely than before to use GPA as a first screen to prioritize applicants for further review and interviews, a still significant percentage (42%, down from 73% in 2019) do (see link below), and 3.0 is the most common screening GPA.
This does not mean that it is impossible to get a job out of college with a <3.0 GPA, though it can be more difficult in unfavorable labor markets in, and does not mean that it should be a point of frequent parental nagging.
@EconPop thank you so much for coming back around and sharing. I really valued your perspective when S2 was moving through the app process and then in school.
He too was an average student (on a good day!) and life is turning out pretty well. The pride he felt when he graduated from college was palpable and so incredibly well deserved. If resilience was a major, he would have graduated with honors . He’s a year out of school now and working hard at finding a place in his chosen career. That hard work includes putting together part time jobs in his field with co-op opportunities and at every turn building his network and his references. I don’t know when it will break for him but I know it will. More importantly, he does too.
“Space and grace” got me through high school with him. “Life is long, pace yourself” is getting me through his 20’s. Turns out the biggest lessons were always, really, for me to learn not him.
Cheers to your son and all he’s accomplished and all that’s yet to come!
13 Likes
Exactly how I feel 
3 Likes
Absolutely fair! I didn’t mean to imply that some completely-new moral rot has appeared out of nowhere, lol. I was just thinking about how, for example, I sent a daughter off to college in the 2010’s, to a state where I would now worry about barriers to healthcare access in a way that I didn’t then. So I just wondered whether the landscape had changed meaningfully from your perspective. “No” is a good answer, though!
1 Like
Son definitely had a few interesting moments in Ohio regarding racism.
One of the most surprising came from a place he did not expect. First week on campus, he struck a fast friendship with a random freshman on campus. They became good friends and agreed to be roommates their second year. Early in the second year, the roommate invited my son to a weekend trip to his home an hour away. As they walked in the house, the guy’s brother started making inappropriate jokes about MLK and Black people in general. The parents were standing there and did nothing to correct their son’s behavior. My son had traveled there in his roommate’s car and though he was very uncomfortable, he had no way to get back to Dayton, so he toughed out the weekend. After that, the relationship with the roommate was never the same and my son chose a Black roommate for year 3.
There were a few other incidents like that. Few, but obviously very memorable. To be fair, the faculty and staff at UD were great and son never had complaints of racist behavior from them. The latent racism came more from the general populace, business establishments, and from a small minority of students. During a time I visited him during his freshman year, son was excited to take me to a golf course where he’d been with a couple of classmates. A middle aged white guy came up to us midway through and said something racially inappropriate but in a polite manner. Less politely, I let the guy know he was making a big mistake.
But that was to be expected. You don’t grow up Black in America without experiencing that sort of thing, so it didn’t ruin his world. It just surprised him when it came from his roommate’s family.
The point is, being in Ohio was not really all that different from how a young Black man might be treated anywhere in America. It could have (and has) happened in NYC, Virginia, Chicago or Florida.
Regarding women’s access to healthcare, I would definitely not send a daughter to a problematic state.
9 Likes
This is a large change in a relatively short space of time?
I love this.
2 Likes
What was the roommate’s reaction, then or afterwards?
1 Like