I’m baffled by how many kids seem to have a hard time leaving home. I don’t remember anyone having this problem when I was growing up. In fact, everyone I knew was dying to leave home for whatever adventure awaited us – college, trades, marriage, work of any type. We just couldn’t wait to get out, have our own places, and be treated as adults. I know that it cost much less to leave the nest back then, but I’m responding more to the eagerness and readiness we had that seems to be missing from so many now. I don’t think that leaving college is the issue (and I agree with @SJ2727 that I’d like to see the data that shows this is a real trend) but, rather, fear of launching. Maybe we’ve made home too comfortable and life too easy for our kids? Maybe we didn’t beat them enough?
ETA: When our 14-year old received his first acceptance to a boarding school, he waved the letter in my face and laughed, “See you later, mom!” Maybe I should have been more concerned…
I expected to be homesick but mostly I felt relief of not having to do all my home responsibilities and just be responsible for me & my learning. I felt slightly guilty NOT to felt homesick, but decided I deserved to dive into my new experiences and do I did.
My older brother was very homesick because he wasn’t happy in Boston—cold & so different & law school was challenging.
Could get a decade of data. There’s no sudden increase, in fact for full time students, most recent data show a small decline vs a decade ago. There was an upward blip around the pandemic.
Most college students who drop out of school do so in the first academic year.
22.9% of all students who entered college as freshmen in Fall 2024 did not return in Fall 2025.
Among those Fall 2024 college freshmen who did not return for Fall 2025, 62.0% dropped out before Spring 2025.
At 4-year institutions, 18.3% of first-time, full-time college freshmen dropped out between 2022 and 2023.
4-year, public schools have the lowest dropout rate among all first-time freshmen, with 17.9% of students dropping out between the fall semesters of 2022 and 2023.
4-year private for-profit schools have the highest dropout rate of 38.7% for full-time students.
Actually one of the reasons I was desperate to leave the state was my needy HS boyfriend. I wanted distance & he married one of his co-workers shortly after I left the state. Phew! I was ready and very excited to start a new chapter and embrace novelty. I never told anyone about this reason for leaving the state.
If you want to get really sad read the parents page from any major residential college. Kids are weak and coddled. “I dont like my roommate after 2weeks”. Parent calls the dean of students.
Grad school is highly overrated. I spent four years working on my kid to steer him away. I think it’s done, but can’t claim credit for this — many other people helped, including some of his profs. It is mostly his decision in the end.
I’m not baffled by it, but I wanted to mention how everyone when I was growing up was chomping at the bit to get their driver’s license at 16 and so many kids now don’t want to. We had to strongly encourage our kids to do it while they were in high school. They still waited until senior year.
I was ambivalent about S going to grad school but he opted not to and preferred to take his career job right out of college, working for the fed govt. He held that job for a decade and then decided to work for himself. He’s not wanted to go to grad school and so far has been very happy being an entrepreneur.
I think so much depends on where you’re from. When I graduated from high school I was one of the few students who went “away” to college. Most lived at home and went to one of the nearby CSU campuses or community college. This was a blue collar community in Los Angeles county where I only knew one father who wore a suit to work.
Where I raised my kids almost all went away to college. Some of their classmates did end up coming back home. Some ended up transferring to the local university. All of mine had friends who went to a well regarded university two hours away. They each had a friend who was homesick and came home often for the weekend. I think the close proximity made it easy to come home.
5 Decades After Adoption, St. Louis Man Learns His Father Is a Rock Star
The first time Michael Goessling, who was adopted as an infant, spoke to his biological father he asked him what he did for a living.
Musician, said the man, who called himself “Mike.”
Still on the phone, and sitting in his car in his driveway, Mr. Goessling had already begun scouring the internet when Mike mentioned he was on tour and would be performing in St. Louis, where Mr. Goessling lives.
“And I’m looking, and the voice, and it all starts coming together,” Mr. Goessling recalled during a phone interview on Thursday. “I just spit it out: ‘Are you Michael McDonald?’ He chuckled and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m afraid so.’”
Mr. Goessling was born in St. Louis, near where Mr. McDonald grew up. It turned out Mr. McDonald and his former girlfriend, who remained friends over the years, had spent some 30 years looking for their son.
Mr. McDonald’s younger son took an ancestry test, which showed he had a brother named Michael Goessling in St. Louis.
On May 6, 2025, Mr. Goessling received a letter in the mail from a lawyer representing his birth parents, asking if he would like to be put in touch with them
