The last  couple of days, I’ve been  exploring why some teenagers can’t emotionally handle their freshman year in college while other students behave worse than toddlers. Here are the posts:

 A Nightmarish Experience at an Ohio University
Could This Student’s Freshman Year Have Been Saved?

I was ready to move on to other topics – some parents have been asking questions about the FAFSA – –  but I decided to linger one more day on this important topic because of a note that I received last night from a woman who has spent more than two decades working with college students.

I think you’ll find her observations fascinating yet sobering. And some parents don’t come off looking good either – they are enabling a lot of this inexcusable behavior. Next week, I promise I’ll tackle the FAFSA and other topics.

An Insider’s Take on Bad Behavior

I spent 25 years working as a student affairs administrator at six different colleges, and was the director of residential life at two. I did my master’s thesis on college roommate compatibility. Sadly, this is an issue that is rampant at colleges across the country, and across the different strata of colleges–elite to open admission. My daughter experienced similar at a small Roman Catholic college.

Without writing a thesis here (which I could), I believe this stems from a convergence of two trends:

No. 1:

First, students go off to college having had unprecedented luxuries growing up. They have never shared a bedroom. Many have never even shared a bathroom. They have their own cars, their own phones, their own credit cards, and have been given a great deal of personal freedom while still in high school. Their parents have leveraged their own lives to provide the financial support such that students have little concern for the price of attending college.

Transitioning to a largely unsupervised residence hall just kick starts their desire to live a life like they have seen on MTV and in the popular media. And although their college may have asked them questions about their lifestyles to encourage roommate compatibility, too often, their parents filled out the questionnaire, or the student was afraid to be honest (“I smoke weed, I drink four nights a week, and my partner and I have been intimate since we were 15″) for fear their parents will see the questionnaire.

No. 2:

Colleges, in their quest to recruit students, provide accommodations and amenities that are more like cruise ships. Free high speed internet, free laundry equipment, 24-hour a day food service catered to each student’s whim, free health club, free 24-hour a day medical care, free counseling services, free tutoring, non-stop activities, parties, movies, clubs. They have private rooms in suites with living rooms and kitchenettes and free cable TV.

What’s Wrong With the Parents

Legal restraints and a fear of losing enrollment have made colleges unwilling to impose strict discipline or oversight. Many parents don’t make it any easier by refusing to allow students to take responsibility for their behavior, calling constantly to intervene or plead for special consideration. I was even offered bribes to “overlook” issues, but more often I was threatened with lawyers.

What will it take to change this? A fundamental shift in how we view college from a time of extended adolescence to a time for learning real-life skills for careers and adulthood. Instead, they graduate, deeply in debt, and wondering why they can’t find a job that will pay enough for them to be able to afford a private apartment, internet, health club, vacations, health insurance, and a housekeeping staff to clean up the vomit in the bathroom every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night.

What Do You Think?

As always, please weigh in with your comments at the bottom! I’d love to hear what you think.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy

My Upcoming College Workshop:

I will be holding two college workshops at the University of California, San Diego on Jan. 28 and Feb. 4.  At the workshops — you can sign up for one or both – I aim to share with you ways to help you make smart decisions about picking colleges and making them more affordable.

You can learn more here and sign up for the workshops here. As you’ll see, you must register with UCSD Extension before you can enroll.

Thanks. Lynn O.

I want to thank everyone who commented on the plight of a bright young woman, who left the University of Dayton after her freshman year. Her first roommates were pigs and her experience unnerved her and her mother. If you missed the post and the accompanying comments, here is where you can find them:

A Nightmarish Experience at an Ohio University

I asked for people’s reaction to the story and what could have been done to avoid this situation or ameliorate it. Here are my thoughts in no particular order:

1. Is the school a good academic fit?

The mom shared that her daughter had earned a 4.5 GPA at her high school, which made me wonder if this was the right school for her. (At least one poster questioned whether this school represented an academic fit.) Frankly, I don’t know much about the University of Dayton except that it is a Jesuit institution in Ohio.

I did take a look at the academic profile of the freshmen attending Dayton and clearly the California teenager possessed a higher academic profile than most of her peers.  According to the College Board figures, 27% of Dayton’s freshmen were in the top 10% of their high school class.

Now let’s compare that to the percentage of students attending two Ohio colleges that attract many high achievers. Here are the number of freshmen in the 10% of their high school class at Oberlin College (68%) and Kenyon College (63%).

If the teenager was a studious girl, she probably would have been better off at a school where there is a large concentration of teenagers who are  high achievers.

2. Did she make friends?

A study released last month suggests that the odds that a child return for a second year of college could hinge on whether she has friends on campus. According to the study published in the Social Psychology of Education, friendships were more important in freshmen retention than a student’s academic abilities, financial aid, ethnicity and other issues. Here is a brief story on the study in Inside Higher Ed.

3. Did she have to live in a quad dorm!

I don’t know what the chances of getting along with your college roommate are when only two students share a small room, but they have to plummet when four strangers are stuck together in a quad.

One of my daughter’s friends suffered through a similar experience as a freshman at George Washington University. Among other issues, Caitlin’s friend was living in a quad with girls who partied late into the night and had sex with boyfriends in the room without regard to the roommates. She was utterly miserable and it played a part in her decision to leave the school. She took a semester off and ended up transferring to Georgetown University.

If I was a freshman, I’d try to avoid quads. This living arrangement can be fine for older students because they can pick their own roommates after they’ve made friends on campus. Tip: submit your housing preferences as soon as possible!

4. Was she able to designate the kind of roommates she wanted?

Many schools have incoming freshmen complete roommate questionnaires that might cut down on some of the friction. I wonder if the University of Dayton offered this.?

5. Did she have good coping skills?

Kids who are used to handling their own problems are often better able to cope with adversity including piggish roommates. When my son and daughter were growing up, my husband and I made it clear to them that they were expected to work out differences on their own. We knew we weren’t helping their development if we always interceded when they were squabbling and played referee.

When one of our kids complained about a teacher or any situation that they considered an injustice, we’d sympathize, but then we’d ask  them how they could turn the situation around. We didn’t tell them what to do, but instead urged them to think on their own. I believe this helped when they got to college.

6. Did she let her mom take over?

I loved this observation from Susan, a mom in San Diego, who wrote this yesterday:

Once parents get involved, and I know they might have to sometimes, then I think some teens might feel they can’t handle it (or anything?) on their own. Once the parent is stressed and unhappy on their teen’s behalf, then I think the teen might think the situation or school is unfixable and they HAVE to come home.

“Sounds like you are at the end of your rope, do you think I can take any action that would help?” has been a good approach for us with high school. We’ve had one time where we got a “yes, I am too angry to handle dealing with the school”, and on all other occasions our help has been declined, with a certain amount of horror expressed at the very thought of our involvement.

What’s the good news?

What I hope no one overlooks is this: leaving your first college doesn’t mean that you can’t have a positive college experience and move on to a meaningful career.

My husband and I were talking about this last night when we were walking our golden retriever. I asked him to talk about his own experience and those of his three best buddies in high school in Denver, whom Bruce described as close as a band of brothers.  Three out of the four ended up transferring someplace else.

Two of his friends started out as freshmen at Pomona College. Dave had planned to attend Brown University, but Leigh talked him out of it and they both ended up at Pomona. Sometime during the first semester they stopped talking to each other and one transferred to Colorado College and the other went to the University of Colorado.

My husband also ended up bailing on his first school — Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR — and transferred to UC Berkeley. He decided that Lewis and Clark was too homogenous. He thought the school attracted too many white affluent students, which was the same environment as his school — Cherry Creek High School — so he bailed and transferred to UC Berkeley. (Note: he never visited Lewis and Clark nor UC Berkeley, which will seem alien to parents today!)

The two teenagers who ditched Pomona — one is a successful lawyer in Denver and the other is a chief technology officer at a Boston company. My husband is a highly respected technology writer in San Diego.  The only one of Bruce’s best friends who didn’t transfer (a Stanford finance grad) made enough money to semi retire in his 40s.

Bottom Line:

I hope this young woman doesn’t consider herself a failure. She’s a little wiser now and today is the only day that counts. (I hope that didn’t sound too much like a Hallmark card!)

I also agree with many of my posters who observed that this could have happened anywhere. I don’t think attending school out of state increases your chances of having a miserable college experience.

My Upcoming College Workshop:

I wanted to let you know that I will be holding my next two college workshops at the University of California, San Diego on Jan. 28 and Feb. 4. At the workshops — you can sign up for one or both – I aim to share with you ways to help you make smart decisions about picking colleges and making them more affordable. You can learn more here and sign up for the workshops here. Lynn O.

I wanted to share with you today a comment that I received yesterday from a California mom, who shared the heart-wrenching experience of her bright daughter, who started college in Ohio. She was prompted to write after reading my college blog posts about students who desire to attend schools far from their homes. Here are two of them:

 Snobs, Pushy Relatives and Misinformed Parents

California Teen Gets Grief For Liking Southern Universities

Please read the mom’s story and after reading it, I’d be curious what you think. What advice could you give to students so they don’t encounter the same problems? Or what could students do when they encounter this kind of all-to-common behavior at college?  Just let me know what you think by filling out the comment box at the bottom of this post. I’ll share my thoughts tomorrow.  Thanks. Lynn O’Shaughnessy

One Mom’s Story

I want to share my daughters experience about leaving California and attending a well-know university in Dayton, Ohio. A year and a half ago my daughter graduated in the top 5% of her class, from a prestigious high school in a small town in California. She was able to get into every school in California that she applied too! She chose to attend the University of Dayton, Ohio. She picked this school because she wanted to go to a well attended university outside of California.

Nightmare Roommates

She didn’t know a soul in Ohio! She was placed in a quad room( 4 people) in freshmen dorms. She had done all she could to prepare her self for her new roommates. They talked on the phone, corresponded through Facebook, etc., but  nothing could have prepared her for the experience that was to follow. The first week, they had boys staying the night, partying all night long, blaring the TV and music. The final straw was a boy urinating on my daughters bed! The roommates stated wasn’t their problem!

We were able to get an emergency move after much threatening and many, many phone calls. A complete stranger that was an employee at the school finally took pity on my daughter and her inability to get help from the staff and she was able to facilate a move.

Emails phone calls to faculty and even the university president were never answered or returned!! This is a school, where the president addressing us parents and incoming freshmen, promised they would be “home away from home.” They would be there for our children!

Too Traumatized To Return

My daughter ended up going through 3 different sets of roommates in her freshmen year. It was so terrible that she begged to not go back, to her dream university! She gave up her scholarship and is now attending our local junior college and preparing to transfer next year, to a California school.

I share her story only to show there is another side to leaving California schools. I realize that my daughter’s experience was exceptionally bad and only heightened by the lack of communication, compassion, and help provided to us by the University of Dayton. It pains you greatly to hear your child cry everyday for over 9 months. To know that no one is able to help her! I can’t begin to describe the torture it was for our whole family.

When my daughter finally returned home to California, she was humiliated because she had a 4.5 GPA leaving high school and now her only option was to attend a junior college to get enough units to transfer.

I told my daughter, she should not feel bad for having followed her dream. At least she tried it!

What Do You Think?

Now that you’ve heard the mom’s story, what do you think?

Does a winning college football team make it’s students stupid?

Maybe. At least the men.

That’s the conclusion you could reach after reading a study released right at the beginning of the college bowl season by economists at the University of Oregon. The researchers examined the grade point averages of the student body at the University of Oregon and compared them to the performance of  Oregon’s football team.

“Our results support the concern that big-time sports are a threat to American higher education,” the authors wrote.

The New York Times wrote an article yesterday about the college football study. Here is an excerpt of the key findings:

The greater the football team’s success, the wider the gender gap in academic performance. Glen R. Waddell, one of the researchers, was quoted as saying, “I teach these students and I know that on Thursdays there’s this subtle distraction in the classroom, and the game isn’t even until Saturday.”

The economists looked at Oregon undergraduate transcripts of close to 28,000 non-athletes from 1999 through 2007. During that period, the Oregon Ducks had an average winning percentage 68%. The economists included interviews with students during this period of time and discovered that 24% of male students said Oregon football wins definitely or probably decreased their study time compared with nine percent of women.

What’s my take on the study? I think it’s just another indication that college football has gotten out of control. Coaches salaries, player exploitation, a wide variety of scandals (Penn State just one of many) are just some of the problems, but I don’t see this genie ever getting shoved back into the bottle. Sad, but true.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller,  and a financial aid workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Price of a Bachelor’s Degree, which is only available on her website.

Below you’ll find a guest blog written by Bob Bessette, the father of a junior at Bowdoin College in Maine, who is finishing up her semester of studies in Ireland.  I was particularly interested in his post because my son Ben, who is a sophomore at Beloit College, plans to attend school  in Ireland for a semester during his junior year.

If you want to learn even more about studying abroad, I wrote my own post on the subject two years ago when my daughter, a graduate of Juniata College, was studying at the University of Barcelona for a year. Here is my post: Studying Abroad: 7 Things Parents Should Know

Here’s is advice from Bob who writes his own blog at TotallyUniqueLife:

Studying in Ireland

Four long months have passed since we our daughter left to study abroad at the University College Cork in Ireland.  When she returns in a week,  she will be presumably a lot wiser, not only in the subject matter she has been studying, but also in the ways of the world.  I guess that’s the essence of studying abroad – to expand your horizons and get to know another culture other than the one you have lived in for your whole life.  Based on a recent conversation with my daughter, it appears that the study abroad semester has been successful.  She said just the other day during a Skype session,

“I’m just starting to realize that I’ll be leaving soon. Ya know, I’m really going to miss this place but I’m really looking forward to coming home.”

Isn’t this what you really want to hear as a parent?  She has fostered friendships with others who were also studying abroad, as well as with Irish students.  During this time she has also been able to visit two additional countries, Scotland and Italy.  She created a life for herself at her dorm making dinner on a nightly basis with roommates from other countries that also enjoy the cooking process.  She has explored the region, gotten to know the natives at the local marketplace and pubs, and has garnered a true sense of what the Irish culture is all about.

Study Abroad Tips for Parents

As parents, this was the first time my daughter had ever gone on a plane by herself.  We have traveled to Greece, Spain, and domestically as a family over the years, but this was the first time we ever watched, with misty eyes, as she walked through security to head off on her own adventure without us. Actually, it was a lot tougher leaving her off at college for the first time.  But this was different since we couldn’t just jump into our car, drive two hours, and be with her should she need us.  After four months of dealing with our daughter studying abroad, here are five tips I’d like to share with parents whose children are about to embark on a similar experience.

1. Finalize Travel Plans

One rather unnerving experience occurred while we were checking my daughter’s bags at the airline terminal the day she was leaving for Ireland.  The attendant asked my daughter if she had her return ticket yet and she responded “Not yet”.  The attendant told her “Then I can’t let you travel today”.  Needless to say, we were taken aback.  He explained that there was a recent edict from the State Department disallowing foreign travel unless a return flight was already booked.

Luckily my daughter had already scoped out return flights so she had a good idea of what it would cost.  She asked him if she could buy a ticket online right there using her laptop. He said “Sure” but he just needed to see the details and proof of purchase.  Within minutes she had bought her ticket online, showed him the ticket number, and we were on our way to eat some lunch before she was off to the security line.  Look into whether or not your child will need a return ticket before taking off.  It may save you from some heart palpitations at the airport.

What is strange is that my daughter actually knew of others from the U.S who did not buy their return flight before they left and had no problems flying to Ireland.  Perhaps it was a temporary thing or something related specifically to the airline.

2. Skype is your Friend

If you have not heard of Skype yet, get to know it.  Skype is a software application that will allow you to have a video chat with your child over the internet at no cost.  All it requires is that you download the application onto your computer and your child does the same.  You will also need a webcam that will plug into a USB port on your computer.  My daughter’s laptop already had a built-in webcam.  We had to buy one for our computer at a very reasonable cost.

One amazing aspect of this study abroad experience is that we actually have had more contact with our daughter since she has been in Ireland than when she is two hours away at college.  With Skype we have gotten to see and talk to her regularly and have not missed her nearly as much as we thought we would have.  There is something about seeing her and talking to her, in lieu of using email or talking on the phone, that allays those pangs of separation anxiety.  If there is one tip I would give any parent whose child is heading abroad it’s download Skype.

Technical Note: When my daughter got to Ireland she could not use Skype in her room at the dorm due to what we thought was a firewall issue.  What was strange was that another roommate could use Skype to communicate with her family.  We discovered that the latest version of Skype, which was on my daughter’s computer, would not work with the in-dorm proxy server.  All she had to do was uninstall the latest version of Skype, install the older version and Skype was up and running.  Hopefully your child does not have a similar issue but, if he or she does, this could be a potential solution.

3. Consider Social Media

My wife and I do not do Facebook but, to be honest, it may make a lot of sense to create a Facebook page so that you can have access to any pictures or comments that your child posts to their Facebook page.  Fortunately, my daughter created a blog when she went to Ireland that allowed us to see her pictures and hear of her adventures in Europe.  The only problem is that she posted all of her pictures on Facebook but only a few on the blog.  We had to ask our youngest daughter or other family members to log into their Facebook page so that we can see the many pictures our eldest has posted.

If you use Twitter and your child does as well, this is another way of using Social Media to keep in touch with your child abroad.  My daughter doesn’t do Twitter but, believe it or not, I do so it wasn’t a viable mode of communication for us.  It could be another option if both you and your child are regular Tweeters.

4. Bring Enough of the Essentials

This may seem obvious but some of the basic items that your child uses every day may not be available in the country to which they are heading.  For example, my daughter could not find quality dental floss or Chapstick in Ireland.  These are two items that she uses every day.  So I ended up shipping her 2 packs of dental floss and a 3-pack of Chapstick in one of those padded envelopes.  Unfortunately, the package did not arrive for over a month and we had thought it had gotten lost in the mail.  In the meantime, she was able to get these items from someone else who was visiting from the States.  If your child uses something on a regular basis, make sure they bring enough of it to last them the amount of time that they will be abroad.

5. Try to Relax

We, as parents, go through a lot when it comes to our children.  If you are anything like my wife and I, you worry about anything and everything that could go wrong with your child.  It is especially difficult when they are in another country far away from your control.  If I were to give some advice to my fellow parents it would be to try to concentrate on the many benefits of the adventure on which your child is about to embark.  If you try to focus on how much your child will gain from this experience, it will be a lot easier for you to relax.

In one week we will be welcoming our child, with open arms, back from an adventure that only she has experienced.  It was tough on all of us but personal growth is achieved through trying times.  I somehow think that she will be a little bit older and little bit wiser from the experience.  I wish you and your child much success with your mutual study abroad experience!

Bob Bessette is a parent who has felt the pangs of separation anxiety associated with his daughter going away to college.  He writes about experiences like this, and others, on his own blog entitled TotallyUniqueLife, which deals with practical solutions, tips, and advice for your life.

What is the best way to support your college students when they head off to college?

Today I’m going to share some examples of what parents can do for their children besides writing those big tuition checks.  These ideas come from the authors of The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting them Grow Up.

In this age of instant communications, here are some of the authors’ tips for parents:

1. Let students initiate the calls.

Or at least most of them. In their research, the authors concluded that students, who reported that their parents were making most of the calls, were the least happy. (Unlike my daughter Caitlin who liked calling my husband or I every day when she was in college, my son Ben almost never calls unless he needs something. Consequently, we try calling him once a week on Sunday afternoon when he’s usually in his room doing homework. He seems to appreciate our calls and can be quite chatty.)

2. Send care packages.

Don’t let phone calls and emails replace the traditional way that parents used to connect — through letters and care packages. One of the rare calls that we got last year from our son Ben during his first month of college was to request a care package of salt water taffy, ping pong balls, dried chili mangos and blow pops. (I use priority rate boxes from the post office which allows me to stuff as much as possible into a box for one set price.)

3. Include dads.

Research has suggested that many students, and especially daughters, would like more contact with their fathers. Since moms appear to get more of the calls, they should be the ones trying to get dads to connect more.

4. Skip Facebook.

Parents should resist the urge to initiate Facebook friend requests with their children. For parents who have access to their college students’ Facebook, it can be awfully tempting to snoop.

5. Respond appropriately to venting.

Just because your child is venting about a roommate from hell, a lousy professor or crummy dorm food doesn’t mean you have to get riled up too. And don’t assume that you need to jump in with solutions. It’s hard for a student to become an adult if you are always providing the answers. (Hopefully parents have been following this tip long before their kids enter college!)

6. Be a great listener.

Be in the moment. Give your child space to think out loud and come up with his or her own solutions to problems.

7. Don’t be a nag.

I admit I was guilty of being a nag when my son was in high school. I’d pestered him about reading, starting his college applications and studying for the SAT. I’m proud to report, however, that once he started college, I stopped nagging him and he stepped up to the plate and took responsibility for what he needed to do. We both felt better about our changed roles.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of  Shrinking the Cost of College workbook.  She also writes a college blog for  CBSMoneyWatch and US News. Follow her on Twitter.