I am wondering if all the classes that lost a year of high school will have some problems adjusting to college life?
My D24 lost freshman year and while she did fine in her school work I think it did a number mentally. Luckily she has been going to counseling and that has seemed to help.
I also wonder the difference between those that had strict lockdowns and those states that did not. We were pretty much out of in-person school for a year and a half. I wonder if those states where kids went back earlier have had better outcomes?
Agree with you completely. We need to talk about challenges and how some of these parents with their kids already been in college faced it.
Good luck with your efforts to help your child.
We have a son who is in the spectrum (sixteen in 10th grade) and doesnāt like talkingā¦ itās a challenge to help him.
I think we might be in the same state, based on things youāve shared before? DS is at Purdue and got the smackdown from Calc 2, as we warned him might happen. And, yeah, coming home vs. staying is mitigated a lot by him being nearby and the schoolās affordability.
Out of the 7 kids he is actually close to and knows the reasons, one was pure culture shock (girl went to a southern school and rushed a sorority), a couple of the guys said their schools were too far, and the other four had major academic issues. He said a couple of them had mental health struggles and probably should have taken a gap year. I imagine the parents of the ones with major academic issues told them they arenāt paying if the kids arenāt getting decent grades.
I think it just seems crazy all coming from one class. I mean I guess if that is average across the board it makes sense but really seems like a lot to me from one graduating class. We are used to hearing about a few transfers and maybe one or two who decide to move home and work but 20 seemed over the top to me.
Hugs to all with kids struggling. We do not have many who drop out from our private HS, but we do have a lot who transfer after the first year, due to fit issues(even among ED-ers who were sure), or to transfer āupā to a school that waitlisted them, or transfer to be closer to home, or take a short break for mental health. Many of the transfers seem to take a semester off at some point to figure it out, then they are on their way again, and all the ones we know have been happier at the new place.
I mean, thatās how those rates workāout of a single class of college-bound HS seniors, for every 100 that go to college you can expect somewhere around 20 to not return to college for their sophomore year.* There will be variation from place to place, but if itās anything even remotely normal of a distribution, thatās what youāll usually see.
*Important footnote: Some of them will eventually go back after a break in attendance. But thatās a fairly small proportion.
My husband as well. Graduated HS with a 1.9, almost flunked out of college. Went to community college, pulled up grades, transferred and got a 4.0 at his transfer school, got a masters with a 4.0, then a PHD and is now a professor.
I would have written the exact same thing about my son on the spectrum when he was 16. Itās only in the last year that he has really opened up and been more willing to talk, heās 28. The thing that surprised me the most was he remembered the HS and MS one sided conversations, processed them over the years and he now references them as helping him get to where he is today. I would have bet 10 millions dollars at the time that he āheardā none of it.
This seems to be a particular issue for boys, at least based on the friendsā kids whoāve dropped out. That made us very nervous about S23 (who has ADHD and insisted on taking his PS-5 to college), but he seems to be happy and despite one B- grade (in a compulsory GE class that was deeply tedious), heās interested in his major classes and got an A in Physics. We are all very glad he chose the college with the fewest GE requirements.
True! Persistence rates for men have, for several decades now, lagged persistence rates for women by between 3 to 4 percentage pointsāand this is a horribly sticky gap, one that has stubbornly resisted efforts to close it.
Itās a known problem, but nobody knows the solution, despite a lot of time and money and effort being thrown at it.
Agreed. Our S23 ended up at a college with a ton of non-major required courses. Depending how you count them, thereās a minimum of 13 semesters, plus up to 4 semesters of foreign language and 2 semester or P.E. You can waive the 4 foreign language with a 5 on the AP (which our son didnāt take for foreign language). So for him thatās 17 courses plus P.E. Of those, a max of 3 can overlap with a STEM major, so thatās at least 14 non-major courses. He wants to double major and most majors have at least 14-15 requirements, and almost no overlap. Usually a full schedule is 4 courses and in most cases it would be hard to take 5 (not counting P.E. or performance units) without hitting the max semester unit cap. So the math doesnāt work for a double major unless youāre doing a lot of summer sessions ā it barely works for a single major if you didnāt pass out of the foreign language requirement.
Ugh. S23 has to do a total of 6 quarter long GE courses (after getting out of one with an AP Latin score of 3 and out of intro writing based on his SAT score). So heāll have about 30 classes in his major, since they take 3 classes per quarter, which should be just about enough for a math/astrophysics double major without overloading if heās so inclined.
We are currently trying to figure out if online GEs at Community College will be an easy and cheap option for the summer, in particular whether they are less harshly graded (his B- was a surprise, given he had 87.5% in Canvas for the course, we assume it was curved).
This was a significant consideration in his application choices. He rejected some potential colleges right away when he found out that they were 50% GEs, and his final options only had 6-10 GE classes (15-25% of the total).
I kind of wish my son had more opportunity, or was forced to take more random classes outside his major. If he sticks with his current major, heāll only be able to take like 4 more non-major related classes the rest of his time there, thereās very little wiggle room. To me, one of the most valuable aspects of college is expanding your world a bitā¦ taking those random classes that have nothing to do with STEM i think would be incredibly useful. On the other hand - 17 non-major related classes does seem high.