To The Parents Of College Kids Everywhere,
College is really hard. Like, really hard.
I know that every time we call you crying, you are just trying to encourage us and make us feel better, but honestly, college is a beast that only other college students understand. College has changed drastically over the years, and I can tell you that becoming easier was not one of those changes. In fact, college has gotten harder. If you ask anyone that went to college 10 years ago, they’ll probably say that there would be no way that they would graduate now. So no one really understands college right now any better than struggling college kids.
When we call you crying about that terrible test grade we got, telling us that we’ll do better next time only makes us feel worse about our first terrible grade. In college, you’re lucky if you get three tests and the final, some classes you only get one test and the final. The tests can be worth up to 70% of our grade. So if we get one failing grade on an exam, chances are we have a very low chance of redeeming our GPA to be anything better than a B.
When we call you crying because we just spent three hours on a homework assignment and than found out that we did it completely wrong, telling us that its alright is extremely frustrating for us. Each four credit class requires 9 hours of outside work to be done in order to get a semi decent grade. The average college student takes up to 5 of these for credit classes, which means we have to do up to 45 hours of work OUTSIDE our scheduled classes in order to at least pull through with a C. Now if you add in actually having to go to class, eat, sleep, shower, do laundry, run errands, clean, cook, and go to the gym, you’ll find that we literally don’t have enough time in our lives to do everything we need to do. So the fact that we just wasted 3 hours on an assignment that we apparently didn’t understand probably ruined our day, and made it so that completing something else would either have to wait until tomorrow, or will keep us up until 4 in the morning.
Our Professors are amazing, and we understand why they are Professors, but once in a while we get Professors who are the worst instructors on the planet, which results in us having to teach the class to ourselves. This leads to a lot of stress and terrible grades. We want to just vent to you, to voice our frustration. Telling us that it isn’t the end of the world kind of sends us over the edge because, it IS the end of the world if the class is a requirement for your degree and we don’t do well. It makes getting our degree that much harder.
When we call you and tell you about how terrible college is, we just want to vent. We just want our voices to be heard, for someone else to know that college is one of the most challenging things that we will do in our lives. College kids struggle, at some point I’m sure every one of us will struggle with something. When we call you, our parents, please remember that we have a lot on our plates. We have taken on a task that is nearly impossible to complete for some people. We want you to just be there and listen. We want to just express our frustrations on someone that we know will listen to us no matter what.
So parents, parents of struggling (all) college kids, please just listen. Hear us out and find something else to say besides, “you’ll do better next time” or “its alright.” Please try to understand us when we say the things we do, because in some cases, there isn’t a next time, and in some cases, it won’t be alright, at least not to us anyway.
