Love this, @twoinanddone. Simpler times…
There is no substitute for reading the book preferably before class discussions/lecture/group work. Quite a few students do not follow this advice. They think they can just sit and passively listen during class and use the “get help” or “show me how” feature of whatever learning management system they use but by the time the tests and final come around they find out by not reading the book they are only getting the tip of the ice berg in terms of information.
It takes time to read each chapter for each class before class.
There are no shortcuts.
You can’t Google your way into a professional career and last more than three weeks.
At some point you have to know what is in the book.
Keep track of how you are doing in class and if it isn’t what you think it should be, change what you are doing. Go to Professor’s Office hours, Get a tutor, Form a Study Group.
Also, don’t sacrifice your grades because your roommate/girl or boyfriend/family/friends are having issues.
Be aware of the risks of alcohol. Getting drunk can make someone use poor judgement and do something dangerous and/or illegal (beyond underage possession/drinking itself being illegal), or become an easy victim of a crime. Particularly when his/her first experience with drinking alcohol is at a rowdy party with mixed drinks that are difficult to tell the amount of alcohol being consumed. Especially if there is sex involved and there is question about consent afterward.
One that I heard at orientation was to keep a separate binder with a copy of all syllabi. May be necessary to prove what was covered in the course. Does my child do this? Of course not even though I told her to.
Keeping copies of syllabi – where this comes up is when the student transfers to another college and wants to apply their transferred credits to meet specific requirements (e.g. major courses) at the new school – the department chair or whoever is reviewing the request may want to see more details about the course in order to decide whether the course is acceptable for meeting the requirement…
In this decade, it’s probably easier to photograph a syllabus and store it on your phone/in the cloud than to make a binder 
And on a related note, taking a photo with your smartphone is a great way to keep your health insurance card, driver’s license, car insurance, passport if traveling and any other docs you might need access to.
Get a flu shot every fall, as soon as they become available.
Study by yourself in a local coffee shop (not Starbucks). A college-student-type coffee shop.
First couple weeks in the dorm, keep your door open when you are in your room and not asleep. Kids will be hesitant to knock on a closed door when they first get there (won’t know if you are studying or otherwise occupied). Much more likely to stop by if the door is open. Easier to make friends that way. Once people are settled in and know each other, closed door is less of an issue.
Don’t request a single room except for medical reasons.
Here’s some advice that I posted in this forum some months ago. I hope it’s helpful in this thread. I’ll shorten it.
It was one of my geologist uncles, a professor at Caltech, who gave me the best piece of advice about choosing courses (not majors) in college. When you get to college, he said, you’re going to hear about some great professor or great course that’s not in your major field of interest. But students will recognize the professor as a guru, someone who inspires students to think about the world in novel or deep ways. You may not get a good grade in it, but by all means TAKE that course!
This is the kind of experience that Steve Jobs had at Reed. He took a course in calligraphy, of all things. Even though he dropped out of Reed, he took inspiration from that teacher and subject to create the proportional space fonts that made the Mac famous. Obviously, Jobs wasn’t thinking about grades when he took the course (most students at Reed never thought about grades – unless called out because their work was unsatisfactory), but he was looking for ideas. And a course in calligraphy at Reed was a course in history and literature, not simply art and design.
I would like to encourage the parents here to encourage their children to take hard courses, to get outside their comfort zone in their coursework at college. Most students change majors at least once. The economy – the world at large – is changing. Prepare for a lifetime of creative endeavor (hopefully remunerative!), don’t just go to college fixated narrowly on a particular major.
I agree @mackinaw – and interestingly my son was just at PFW at Caltech and the class many current students told him to take was the introductory geology course. (Professor is Dr. Asimow.)
Don’t take a great bike to school. Whatever kind you take, lock it.
Get a linkedin. Seems overrated, but I remember cold-calling for some professional opportunities and the person I wanted to work with looked at my linkedin while we were on the phone. The person eventually wrote me a letter of recommendation and we still keep in touch.
You can request special treatment. Office hours are best, but you can request to meet outside of office hours if you work/have other commitments during those times. Waitlist for a class may go slowly, but you can e-mail and say why you are interested in that class.
If you don’t want your bike stolen, buy a clunker awful-looking one, so that no self-respecting thief would want it. No one ever stole our kids bikes, tho D was annoyed they stole her lock and chain.
"Get a top quality fake ID! "
Not needed in Canada. The drinking age is 19 in most of the country, and 18 in Alberta, Manitoba, and Quebec.
“There is no substitute for reading the book preferably before class discussions…”
If you keep ahead, then you know a little bit more at the beginning of each class, which means that you follow the class a bit better, which means that you get further ahead. This works just as well in math classes as anywhere else. I didn’t learn this until graduate school.
“Don’t take a great bike to school. Whatever kind you take, lock it.”
Also don’t just lock the front wheel or the rest of the bike will disappear. In Amsterdam there is a small company that specializes in taking a brand new bike, and making it look like garbage without harming its function in any way. This is of course to deter thieves. There might be an opening for similar very small businesses at most large US universities.
Bring a few simple tools–screwdrivers (maybe even smaller than ones for eyeglasses, etc…), hammer, adjustable wrench, set of Allen wrenches, pliers… You’d be amazed at the number of time you use them and the number of times people borrow them from you.
Put your name on your tools, so you have a chance of getting them back from the people who borrow them.
Really encourage your kids to go to office hours, especially before exams. I always knew where students stood on the material, who had done the reading and who had not. But almost 100% of the time students were reluctant to come to office hours before exams/papers because they were not 100% prepared (or 25%). I’d rather know a couple of days before the test that they had not done the reading and have an opportunity to discuss it with them. And it sure is better for them for the professor to see for sure where they stand a day or two before the exam than on the exam, which will factor into their final grade.
Also, it’s good advice for freshmen to arrange tutors during their first weeks at school. They can line up the best tutors, and they can get help and advice before a hole has been dug. It encourages them to do the reading so that they will be prepared for their meeting with the tutor. The tutor can give helpful advice beyond the work at hand.
Tuition, etc. pay for all of this. Such one-on-one interactions are often the best learning opportunities.
Fantastic advice, all!! I know people will really benefit from this thread!! I would add: if you are flying to college, and attending near a Bed Bath and Beyond (e.g. Boston), strongly consider purchasing your dorm essentials at home using their handy system. They have a truly magical system. You can go to your local BBB NOW, and use their SKU gun to find items off the shelf. It feels like a wedding registry, but it is NOT. Instead, BBB sends the list to the Boston location, and their staff immediately pulls the items OFF THE SHELF, and puts them in boxes behind the store for you. When you arrive in Boston, you provide your ticket, and they dump all your stuff out on a table. You sort through it, pick the stuff that you still want, put the stuff you don’t want in a “reshelving area”, walk through the store for that fan that you forgot to list, and buy what you chose. No prepaying, no penalty for changing your mind, but the bedspread you want is available, and the stuff you need is RIGHT THERE. Instead of renting a car, and spending a couple of days finding dorm gear, we took the T to BBB, spend 90 minutes and got nearly everything that she needed, and took a TAXI back to our condo. Bippity boppety boo! We then realized that we forgot a few things, and took a taxi to the local target - it was horrible. Nothing on the shelves, wall to wall people, etc. SO recommend BBB - especially if you are moving to a city like Boston with multiple colleges. And yes, you can order on Amazon, but how many Amazon boxes do you think the University will have on move in day??? And how many boxes will your student have in their room??