When should parents intervene in college?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Basically never. If they can't fight minimal battles like this by the time they're in college, it's long past time to learn.

Agreed. What comes next...intervening at work?

Why not? “It’s right for our family.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lol. My DD is better equipped to live independently than I am. When she was told she couldn't get into a much coveted high level math class as a freshman she went over her advisor's head, marched into the math office and got an override right then and there. Undergrad research as a freshman? Yep! Got that too. All on her own. Arbitrary grading by a professor teaching an intro class at grad school level? Yep! Dropped that in a heartbeat. Why? Because that's the skill she really needs to succeed. Like the song says "You've got to know when to hold them. Know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away, and know when run..." If you didn't teach your kid to advocate for themselves, then you have to hope life's little lessons will do it for you.

Your DD is SO much smarter than everyone else's kid!! She so much better equipped to deal with life than anyone else!!!!!

Not this PP. But I have a kid like this too. She is just that together. Her brother (parented by the same people) is completely different. So we are teaching him some self advocacy skills in high school so he will be able to handle college - but he will never be his sister. This isn’t about who is smarter or more capable. It also isn’t about being a stellar parent. It’s about working with the kid you have and giving them the skills to manage on their own. For somehow have to do nothing and for some, you have to actively work on it. But if you are working on it in college, it’s too late.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Are we really having this conversation without once mentioning FERPA?

FERPA rules for college are as such, " The student owns his or her own records once they start college, or they turn 18, whichever comes first". I teach this at a Community College. I also do not speak to parents. Once a student hits college, they are adults, and need to learn how to handle situations that may cause them to be uncomfortable, or have to deal with face to face conflict, something that technology has made them extremely poor at. I see students coming into my classroom that are so maturity wise, and emotionally not prepared for college, it is so sad. These students today cannot tolerate discussing controversial topics, they become "triggered" and you have to not only warn them, but you have to give them an alternate place to sit during the discussion on that topic, and not in the classroom. I have taught classes on line during COVID. I watched students shop during class, fall asleep in their beds during class, leave class to go to an appointment and come back. I have been asked for a student to take their final exam 3 weeks after class was finished, because she had forgotten to take it, and then the parent complained to the dean because I wouldn't let her take the final. Thank goodness he was supportive.These are the kind of students that are graduating from our High Schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm the poster who didn't know RESPA, so thanks for clearing up that it's FERPA.

FWIW, I work in a PhD program and have had parents call me, the lowly admin, to ask how their doctoral students are doing. I try to very kindly explain that I cannot tell them anything, but also sometimes convey that I'm amazed that they ask. One of the callers was a professor herself!

Seriously? Because this thread is 5 years old.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The only intervention here is to tell your child to utilize Rate My Professor before registration and to drop before the census date if they don’t like the professor.

The professor can’t talk to you. You’re just going to embarrass everyone involved and give the Professor a good dinner party story.

(recognizing this is years old) but this is the only answer. Its the kids responsibility to do their due diligence on professors and if they didn't once, they will hopefully learn to do it in the future. My DD went to college convinced she could win over any professor and had lots of "bad teachers" in HS that she did fine with. Unfortunately what she didn't realize is that in college, you rarely get to know the professor and cannot establish any kind of relationship with them, or often even speak to them in a meaningful way (office hours can really suck with a bad professor). The next semester she vetted every class she was taking to ensure she knew the profs were good. Lesson learned. Yes her GPA took an unfortunate hit but she learned a valuable lesson.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So I was at a parent orientation session when one of my kids was entering college. A man got up and gave the speech about allowing your adult sons and daughters to navigate their own way, this is a learning experience, they should advocate for themselves and so on. No one can disagree with that. Then he said he'd seen two generations of freshman classes come through, and this was the first time they had to create a "parent liaison" office to deal with parents who helicopter and want to do their kids stuff for them.

So a dad in the audience said maybe it's because colleges have stopped being reasonable, and students are sometimes unable to get results with their reasonable requests, and so parents have more and more had to use their stronger voices of authority to right wrongs. You could have heard a pin drop. Because yeah. If reasonable student requests were respected, parents (who usually don't want to get involved, frankly) wouldn't have to step in.

I stepped in a couple times, interestingly, for computer glitches that happened and the university acknowledged my son's schedule was dumped accidentally, and another son was removed from the choice dorm and placed in the worst dorm (oops, sorry, we see he did register and pay the deposit on the first day the registration opened, and through a computer glitch he and the other first 20 students to register were also dumped. We can try to work him in after school starts. Um no, actually, that's not going to work).

So yeah. After my kids tried and hit closed doors advocating for themselves, I did it. Because I was listened to.

"Well, it sounds like you won't be able to resolve this issue. Please transfer me to someone who can". Done.

Had the universities in these cases treated my kids like the adults they were, I wouldn't have had to step up and demand they be treated fairly.

These are both issues that your kids could have solved on their own with some persistence. But you won't know because you stepped in when things got too frustrating for them.