We just full paid and trusted our kids to find the right balance for them. The education was an opportunity that we gave them not a financial investment that needed to be accounted for. They haven’t let us down. D1 starts a PhD program in the fall with full funding, and D2 is a junior and hopefully holding it together for a difficult semester, but either way, owns it.
I just don’t think parental pressure is helpful - it’s more of a crutch. We’d like them to develop their own regulatory processes to carry them through their lives. I want my kids to be robust to the ups and downs of life.
I’m probably an outlier but I didn’t care what grades my kid got as long as he wasn’t “asked” to leave by the college.
I never asked that he show me his grades but he usually told me anyway. Someone has to be last in the graduating class.
I’d rather my kid graduate with a 2.something (he didn’t but that’s not the point) then not graduate at all.
@thumper1 Would you have really done it though, withdrawn support if they had lost their merit aid? Just curious. If you were and your kids knew it, then that is serious incentive for your kids. Otherwise…
Yes…I absolutely would have done it. My kids knew we were paying for these schools…and that we were sort of like the scholarship of mom and dad. That 3.0 GPA guaranteed we would continue to pay.
I didn’t use any defined parameters with my DD. I told her school is expensive (we are around 1/2 pay at her $60K+ school) and she’s there for school. I told her that I know college is fun and I don’t want to be a buzz kill, but grades are important - it all counts if she wants to go to grad school. I told her to find a healthy balance between school and fun but that she would be brought home to go to school in state if she didn’t hold up her end of the bargain. But, we also have a very open relationship and she talks to me about school, classes, teachers, parties, friends, her troubles. So, I am in tune with the stress level and monitor it. I know what she’s capable of.
@VeryLuckyParent, some families can’t afford to pay the extra if a student loses their merit scholarship. So it is not uncommon for kids to have to change schools if it happens. If you hang around for a while, you will see threads where questions are asked of students or parents about the rules around merit aid they received. Like a college with a 3.3 GPA requirement to keep a scholarship for an engineering major – that is a really risky proposition, to assume the student will maintain that GPA in that major. Some merit scholarships have no GPA requirement – none of the ones my kids got did, including my kid who got merit from UChicago – but it is always a question that should be asked when merit is awarded, to make sure the rules are understood.
We never sat down and had a discussion like this with my daughter, but she knew she had to maintain a 3.0 GPA to retain her full tuition merit scholarship, and she knew she needed an A- in one particular class every semester to retain a fellowship she had.
I know parents who’ve told their kids that any classes they have to retake because they got less than a C- (or whatever the threshold is for a particular course) are on them, and other parents who’ve had their students take out federal loans with the understanding that the parents will repay them if the student performs to a certain level. I know others who’ve simply cut off funding because the student wasn’t meeting academic expectations - I’m not sure whether it was discussed up front or not, but I don’t think there are many students who would assume a parent would keep paying for school if the kid was earning Ds and Fs.
The federal aid definition of being independent for financial aid is that the student needs to be age 24, married, military veteran, or a few other (uncommon for traditional age college students) circumstances. Otherwise, federal aid depends on parent financial information as well as that of the student. Colleges generally follow similar definitions for their own financial aid, though some may be more restrictive.
Its all good with above average students but what would you do if a kid was always a A+B+C mix? She/He may end up getting more C’s in college. Are you going to pull the rug and let them drop out or try to support so they can graduate?
I see education as a gift from parents, not as a loan with fine print and certainly not an investment with grades as dividends. I would have heart to heart discussion with them and try to help them resolve issues causing it.
Yikes- I got a C in one course in my major junior year- still graduated with Honors and went to medical school. Hated that class. Was working dorm food service too.
Our gifted son became an underachiever in HS, his grades going downhill senior year. But he did well in college. He was finally challenged and interested in the courses he chose and was in a great environment. If the student has chosen a good college environment for themselves and become interested in a subject to major in there is the incentive to learn the material- study and do well. Intrinsic reasons work far better than external forces.
Knowing mom and dad will not subsidize an all fun no academic work lifestyle could be needed for students to settle down. Liking what they are doing helps a lot.
You don’t want to set up a series of disincentives for your kid to go to college, work hard and actually learn something, and finish up with a degree after 8 semesters ready to launch into his/her future.
Every time I hear someone come up with a scheme to put a finger on the scale… they are messing with the incentive system. Kid takes only gut classes so as not to mess up the perfect GPA. Great. Grad schools look at the transcript- kid hasn’t challenged him/herself. Employers look at the transcript- kid hasn’t challenged him/herself. So sure- parental objective achieved but the kid can’t launch. Your kid is competing for a grad school spot (not talking med school here where apparently GPA trumps all) with kids who have rigor in their curriculum.
Some college classes are- y’know- hard. So don’t encourage your kids to take the easy way out. You can get a degree in Psychology with a bunch of counseling and family dynamics courses. Or you can get a degree in Psychology with a bunch of courses in statistics, data analysis, behavioral economics, etc. Which one do you think is going to get a job at an Ad agency/market research company/consumer products company??? Even with a C along the way- the rigorous course of study is MUCH more marketable on the outside.
I don’t get this. Raising a kid is sort of a continuum. You get to know the child you have as they grow up. Unless they start doing drugs or something, they don’t suddenly become a different person overnight, so you know going in to college what type of student they are likely to be.
If you have a kid who struggled in high school, for example, you will have a kid who struggles in college.If you have a hard-driving kid in high school, you will have the same kid in college. So what of what use is an incentive/disincentive?
That is the position I’m in. The school merit award already has pressure built in to maintain a 2.8. Other scholarship 3.0. My child definitely doesn’t need me adding more pressure to that as she knows I can’t afford this school if she doesn’t have the scholarship. My other child is not a superstar. She has some learning disabilities and sometimes has to work pretty hard to get a C. Additional pressure or penalties is not going to result in her getting a B.
My nephew worked pretty hard (although goes to a party school and partied pretty hard too) but got a D+ in calc his first semester. He had to retake the class, and then take calc 2 in summer school to stay on sequence. He didn’t want a D, so is ‘punishing’ him going to make a difference? I think he paid for the summer school class himself, but it wasn’t because of a punishment imposed by his parents.
Our kids got merit scholarships to the same LAC that bring down the COA to our state flagship. We are also full pay everywhere. Dentkids need a 2.5 to maintain this scholarship and that was the only “requirement” we made. Individual grades? No, but if we saw D’s and F’s, the scholarship is gone and kid is going to our directional U, CC, or employment.
That said, S1 and D1 are good students and worked hard so we knew that would not happen to them. D2 is off to the same LAC this fall and she knows what’s expected. I do expect to see a few C’s on her transcript…she hasn’t quite bought into 3 hours of class/day or so doesn’t mean you fill the rest with EC’s–there will be a much higher level of outside study required than HS.
Most here will disagree with my comments because I have been called names for pointing out that any hard working kid can achieve straight As at HS and college, no genius is required. How to do it? Unfortunately, it is not realistic to assume that much could be changed at HS. It is very easy to instill a good habit in 5 y o and it is not so easy to do with the 15 - 17 y o. IMO, that is all it takes - a good habit of doing your homework well and turning it on time. It took me one sentence to communicate it to my 5 yo. Incentive would not hurt though. D. was already heavily involved with her sport at 5. All I said was that school was much more important than anything else in her activities and unfortunately we cannot go to her practice until her tiny homework assignment is done and done very well. That one sentence lasted for kindergarten all thru graduating from college, she did not have a single B in her academic career, she did not skip her sport practices either, which later become a daily 3 hrs event, while she added more unrelated ECs to her activities. One of her ECs became a Minor at college.
I say, it takes good habit. So, I do not know how to do it in HS, I believe that it needs to be done much earlier.
Disagree with me as much as you want, I just do not know any other way, so I shared what I know…and we did not have to pay for her college, she was attending on full tuition Merit scholarship.
If the kid parties and bombs, parents should stop being wimps and just pull the plug, period. None of this silly threat of student loans. Big whoop. Where is the kid going to be able to take out massive loans without the parents co-signing. That’s not a threat. Kids who’ve never worked to support themselves cannot perceive the meaning of debt.
My nephew partied in college and lost his merit scholarship. My affluent BIL & SIL ceased ALL financial support despite being easily capable of paying his tuition. Dear nephew enlisted in the Army and did combat in Afghanistan and got some maturity. He finished his duty, returned to college on the G.I. Bill, and finished strong. I am very proud of him.
If parents feel they have to construct some elaborate incentive or penalty system for for their 18-year-old to buckle down and focus on academics in college, perhaps college is no the right choice for that kid right now. Or perhaps starting out at a cheaper institution would be better.
The college-ready student will do the job without financial threats to motivate him/her.
So, this is in line with what you don’t want to see but a punitive approach without any support or teaching is meaningless. Just because the parents threaten (and yes, this deal is essentially a threat to pull money), that doesn’t mean the child will suddenly know how to organize his time or coursework responsibilities.
Make sure the child is ready for to be semi-independent on a day to day basis, if not self supporting, before sending them away to college. Part of that is giving or teaching the child skills and tools as well as outlook to succeed. This isn’t Star Trek - you just can’t say “Make it so” to a struggling student with D’s and expect all of sudden the child to pull A’s.
Parents use carrots and sticks with their children pretty much from the time they are born. So I totally get the urge to do this. But I think this approach might be a mistake, with unintended consequences. It pushes the student to take an easier schedule, with classes from professors who have a reputation for giving lots of A’s.
A better arrangement would be to reward the child for risk, even if it results in a C.
A friend has a DD who attended top private on a large merit scholarship then worked for a couple of years. Mom was able to pay for the remainder of COA.
After college, she worked for a couple of years. It was only then that she came back and commented to her mother about how she finally realized how nice it was not to have UG student loans and what that financial burden would have meant to her if she had had to borrow.
She subsequently turned down a law school that people fantasize about and is attending one with a large merit award.
If this very smart and practical gal had no real concept of loans and its future impact on her life, I would not expect the vast majority of 20 year olds to be properly ‘incentivized’ by threat of having to graduate with loans.
