Perhaps your student has received their midterm grades and is worried.  Or perhaps your student has talked with their professors and has been warned that things aren’t going well.  Or perhaps your student simply knows that they haven’t done what they needed to do so far this semester and things look bleak.

However your student determines that the first half of the semester has gone poorly, they may be wondering whether it is too late to turn things around.  Your student may share their situation with you or may worry about how you will react.  Encourage your student to share their situation honestly with you.  Help them understand that you want to do whatever you can to help them have a successful experience.

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As many college students pass the mid-point in their semester, they begin to realize that the final results this term may not be what they had hoped for.  This is a point in the term when some students give up.  They may decide to withdraw from a class or drop out of college entirely; or they may simply drift through the rest of the term and wait for the inevitable failure or dismissal.  Some students, however, wonder whether they can salvage something from the term to build on later.

If your student is struggling at this point, and is willing to share their situation with you, you want to be able to help them value their mistakes and think about what to do — both immediately and more long term.

First, it will be important that your student decide whether or not they want to salvage anything.  Your student may not, and that may prompt a different conversation.  But if they want to try, you may need to help them think about whether it is possible and if so, what to do. Many students in this situation feel that they have lost control of what is happening in their lives.  The following plan may help them begin to take control once again.

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There’s a quote that’s attributed to Yogi Berra that says, ”You’ve got to be careful because if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.” In true Yogi Berra fashion, his seemingly simplistic quote may contain some important wisdom.

For college students, setting goals and working toward them may be a particularly difficult task.  Some students may be very career oriented and know exactly what they want in life, while others are undecided about their major and have not yet found their direction.  Yet even those students with clear long-term goals may have difficulty defining the shorter term goals that motivate them on a daily basis.  Even more perplexing for many students is the task of separating goals from the action plans needed to reach those goals.

Both long-term and short-term goals are important for college students.  Having clear goals will help your college student stay motivated, prioritize time and energy, manage his time, see the bigger picture of his college experience, focus on important things, and take pride and ownership in his experiences.  Establishing good, clear goals, however, is a difficult task.  It requires clarity of thinking and often a great deal of self-reflection.  You may need to help your college student think about and identify his goals.  Here are a few things to help your student think about as he considers some goals for his college experience — or perhaps just his next semester.

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Students work very hard to get into college.  Students (and their parents) spend years, and countless hours, making just the right list of potential colleges, visiting school after school, studying for SAT or ACT exams, writing college essays, filling out applications, interviewing, and waiting for that all important letter.  Students agonize over the decision to find the place where they feel comfortable, attend Orientations, contact roommates, shop and fill their dorm rooms with all of the necessities.  Why then, do almost 45% of those students who began with so much hope and so many plans, leave college or transfer schools before they complete their degree?

There are hundreds of reasons why students leave the school where they began their college education.  Some students transfer to another school (often losing credits along the way), some dropout entirely, some stopout and return later, and some slowdown and take longer to finish their degree — often as a part-time student.  Because, as parents, we are often used to being responsible for the direction our student takes, we may feel responsible when our student tells us that he wants to leave school.

It is important that college parents understand that there are some factors leading to college success that we can control and help with, and there are factors over which no one has control, or the student alone has control.  It is important to separate the two categories.  In this post, we’d like to take a look at some of the factors that parents can control (a very short list), and some of the major factors that parents cannot control (a much longer list).  We hope that this will help parents understand how varied the reasons for leaving school may be, and also help parents discuss reasons with their college student and help support the college student who may be struggling to succeed.

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