To the parents of freshman right now

[Anonymous]

With all the coddling and handholding that colleges and parents provide now, if your kid is not mature enough at 18 to handle college, a gap year will not help.

This. I was shocked that 50% of ‘orientation’, which was 2 days, was all about the resource upon resource that was avaiable to all students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

With all the coddling and handholding that colleges and parents provide now, if your kid is not mature enough at 18 to handle college, a gap year will not help.

This. I was shocked that 50% of ‘orientation’, which was 2 days, was all about the resource upon resource that was avaiable to all students.

Student retention, graduation rate, and spending per student are all incentivized in ranking formulas. In the old days, a lot more kids dropped out and no one batted an eye. Was that better? I don't know, but the old bootstraps model would be terrible for rankings, which are a north star for many schools and families. What we incentivize, we turbocharge.

All that said, my kid did a gap year, and after a year of working, I think they were more proactive, less passive, and more in touch with why they were going to school. Zero regrets.