college freshman saga continues......thank you for everyone's words of advice...sm

I really appreciate everyone's advice regarding my son and what I should or shouldn't do.  We have had a really interesting weekend.  Not fun interesting.  There was a football game this weekend so he was busy Friday night and Saturday and Sunday he had free.  I offered to let him come home for the day but he didn't want to.  That was fine. 

We went about our day and something told me something was wrong.  Mother's intuition I guess.  He took his car (which is our car that we are making payments on and paying the insurance on and is in our name) and drove it through one pretty darn big city without our permission to his girlfriend's college 2-1/2 hours away to see her on a Sunday afternoon.  It is his car to drive but we had already told him that we were not ready for him to drive that trip.  The car would be signed over to him when and only when he successfully completes college.  We have told him two or three times since school started that he was not to make that drive.  Since he knew we would say no, he just did it. 

Well I texted him a twice and he didn't answer me. My husband texted him a twice and he didn't answer him.  About two hours later he answered.  So when I got home he texted me with this elaborate story of where he was about to go and why he would be out of pocket for awhile.  Alarms went up.  I called him and asked if he was in his room.  He said yes.  I asked him to get on his computer.  He gave me a cock-n-bull story about being on his roommates computer.  I said get on your own.  I see his girlfriend's messenger name sign off immediately. He said what do you want me to do.  I said I want you to log on your screen name.  He told me that his computer wasn't working, he'd have to restart.  Meanwhile I could see while he was restarting his away message was still there.  He restarted.  I said I want you on your screenname.  He signed on.  I said, OK I want you to put up your "I'm in calculus message" (knowing he couldn't duplicate it).  He tried bless his heart but I knew where he was. 

I asked him if that is where he was.  No mom.  I asked him if his roommate was there.  He said no (previously he had said he was there).  I said if I'm wrong I am going to owe you a real big apology but I want you to find a payphone and call me from it.  Figuring I could figure out by the area code if he was lying or I was wrong.  He said OK.  Well immediately I could tell he knew he was caught.  I handed the phone to his dad who he admitted it to.  His dad is going to get the car tonight.

I am so upset.  I am not mad.  I am disappointed.  If he had told me the truth right when I asked I would have been a little disappointed and a little proud of him for stepping up to the plate.  He is going to at the very least not have a car for the rest of the semester, and I am pretty sure he won't do that again.  We called the girlfriend's parents to let them know what happened too.  We know them fairly well and I felt that they needed to know.  She doesn't have a car because they don't want her driving to where he is. 

• college freshman saga continues......thank you for everyone's words of advice...sm - still frustrated
  • Good for you! - Karen
    • Thank you Karen.....sm - still frustrated
      • Hang in there! - Karen
  • My daughter never wanted to go to college out of town, - Older here
  • regaining trust - cat
    • No but he is abiding by the rules now....sm - still frustrated
  • could have wrote you note but sm - MB
    • Bless your heart I hope it works out for you too....No we are not in New England. We live in the So - still frustrated
  • Parenting is so hard....... - trose
    • I think just a few weeks at most ... sm - still frustrated
  • Did he do something really bad that he needs this much control? nm - MslaMT
    • Found your original message below. - MslaMT
  • My mom always held my car over my head.... - shayles
    • Totally agree with this poster - sm - have college kid too
      • I agree with you to a certain extent.....sm - still frustrated
        • My experience - DW
          • This mother saying too big a town for driving through yet - More age on my speedometer
            • you hit the nail on the head! Thank you for saying better than me. sm - still frustrated
              • Keeping tabs and silver platters - Glory1863
                • keeping tabs - country

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Okay, so basically I came on here to vent again!  LOL  So, after the contractors were basically bathing in our pool and sitting on our vehicles and leaving about 20 nails and lunch trash and vinyl siding on our front doorstep....

Today, they were to send out another crew of 2 guys, instead of the original 5.  The owners wife was to come to supervise all day.  So, they show up about 11:30 with their kids and the wife and her two friends all hanging out in my yard...okay fine at least shes supervising....She then proceeded to sunbath in the backyard while smoking about 3 packs of ciggerettes...um, okay..then, you guessed it, left all those butts all over our yard!!  She also never apologized to me personally.  Later in the day, my window is cracked and I can hear her over my typing, so I stop to listen.  LOL  She is complaining loudly on her cell phone how she has to babysit all day because the renters b*tched about the pool.  She was also saying it was only a 1000 galloon pool, so who gives a crap, whats the problem!?!  The pool is actually a 16' pool.  My feelings are that it does not matter if it is a baby pool or an inground pool you do not go to someones house and wash the sweat and dirt off at the end of the day in their pool!

Let me know what you all think!  Do you think I was being too hard on them having a problem with this?  Ugh one more day of work left for them to finish I think.  I'll have to see what happens tomorrow.

I don't get to post very often, but I am kind of at a loss as to what to do.  We are having a real problem here.

My son has always been a very good kid.  He has always made good grades. He has never gotten into much trouble.  Well, he got almost a full-paid scholarship to college.  We always told him that if he got a scholarship, we would get him a car.  Well, he got the scholarship and carefully researched what kind of car he wanted.  We went out and got him a car. 

Subsequently, he became involved with a girl.  I don't have a problem with his girlfriend.  She's very sweet and I do like her.  The problem is this.  I got the first phone bill after he left and he was texting her day and night.  So, we asked him to cut back.  We pay the phone bill.  We make the rules.  We have unlimited messages but 15,000 messages in one month just seems crazy when he is complaining about being exhausted.  We worked it out.  At 10 seconds a message it would be 40 hours worth of texting...

He comes home for the weekend and we take him to dinner.  Fifteen dollar dinner and he is falling asleep at the dinner table.  He proceeds to tell us how miserable he is at school.  We explain to him how sorry we are, but he is stuck there at the very least for this year as he is already enrolled etc.  We also made it clear that he needed to at least try to make it work. 

So, he continues to text day and night even though he promised he would cut down.   He was texting during classes, which just seems wrong to me.  It is disrespectful to the professors and unfair to the students sitting around him.  We threatened to take his phone away.  He finally stopped doing that but now I have my suspicions he is cutting class to talk on AIM to his girlfriend, and he had to drop the only difficult class he had or he was going to fail it and lose his scholarship.  He is lying to us about stuff.  He is being deceitful about stuff.  I am just at my wits end. 

This is a nice girl from a nice family.  We know her parents.  We like her.  We like her parents.  But I feel like she is trying to control his life from 2 hours away and it is working.  It is almost like he is chosing to be miserable to accommodate her.  I talked to her mother last week and one day she called home 15 times.  My husband feels like we shouldn't talk to her parents about this. 

We know that we can't make dating her an issue because that will just make him want to date her all the more.  I am at a loss as to what if anything to do about it.  My husband says that if he is chosing to be miserable then he can be miserable and that college is what you make of it.  I am 95% sure he wants to change schools and go where his girlfriend is going.  Well, that is the most expensive school in the state and he will be giving up a free ride to do that plus he now has an almost new car that we would have to deal with because he would not get to keep that and go to the expensive school.  No way, no how.  I have serious reservations about him going to a school with a party-school reputation when he has a free education at a very good school.  I also do not want to pay $18,000 a year so that he can be with his girlfriend no matter how much I like her. 

Any words of wisdom?

My first daughter was lucky with the scholarships and has just graduated from a private college in state with a degree in Nursing (BSN).   She went to this $34,000 a year  college for $13,000 a year but still has $60,000 of student loans to pay back but she makes $3,000 a month and has no other expenses.  My other daughter chose to go out of state and Massachusetts only  helps in state students.  She goes to Umass at Amherst and there is so many scholarships if you live in MA.  Anyway she is also on student loans.  I told my girls this is the only way you can go to high priced colleges if this is what you want.  They have 10 years to pay for them once they graduate.  Most of their friends are doing the same way.  We also applied the FASA 4 years in a row and it helped with the first child but even when I had both in college it did not help my second child.  She still has to pay the going rate for out of state.  I even called up Umass and said another college  in MA is giving her $10,000 scholarship off the tuition and they said well tell her to go there. I really think it depends on the college.  GOOD LUCK

As parents pack their youngsters off to college, they might ask themselves whether it's worth both the money they will spend and their children's time. Dr. Marty Nemko has researched that question in an article aptly titled "America's Most Over-rated Product: Higher Education (www.martynemko.com/articles/americas-most-overrated-product-higher-education_id1539)."

The U.S. Department of Education statistics show that 76 out of 100 students who graduate in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class do not graduate from college, even if they spend eight and a half years in college. That's even with colleges having dumbed down classes to accommodate such students. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million students who took the ACT college entrance examinations in 2007 were prepared to do college-level study in math, English and science. Even though a majority of students are grossly under-prepared to do college-level work, each year colleges admit hundreds of thousands of such students.

While colleges have strong financial motives to admit unsuccessful students, for failing students the experience can be devastating. They often leave with their families, or themselves, having piled up thousands of dollars in debt. There is possibly trauma and poor self-esteem for having failed, and perhaps embarrassment for their families. Dr. Nemko says that worst of all is that few of these former college students, having spent thousands of dollars, wind up in a job that required a college education. It's not uncommon to find them driving a taxi, working at a restaurant or department store, performing some other job that they could have had as a high school graduate or dropout.

What about students who are prepared for college? First, only 40 percent of each year's 2 million freshmen graduate in four years; 45 percent never graduate at all. Often, having a college degree does not mean much. According to a 2006 Pew Charitable Trusts study, 50 percent of college seniors failed a test that required them to interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, and compare credit card offers. About 20 percent of college seniors did not have the quantitative skills to estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station. According a recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, the percentage of college graduates proficient in prose literacy has declined from 40 percent to 31 percent within the past decade. Employers report that many college graduates lack the basic skills of critical thinking, writing and problem-solving.

Colleges are in business. Students are a cost. Research is a profit center. When colleges boast about having this professor who has won a science award or that professor who has won the Nobel Prize, very often an undergraduate student will never be taught by that professor. It is a "bait and switch" tactic and very often your youngster will take classes not taught by a professor but taught in large classes by a graduate student. Faculty who bring in large grants are more highly valued than faculty who teach well. Teaching excellence is so often undervalued that the late Ernest Boyer, vice president for Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, quipped that, "Winning the campus teaching award is the kiss of death when it comes to tenure."

Parents and taxpayers cough up billions upon billions of dollars to the nation's colleges and universities. Colleges make money whether students learn or not, whether they graduate or not, and whether they get a good job after graduating or not. Colleges and universities engage in "bait and switch," confer fraudulent degrees and engage in other practices that would bring legal sanctions if done by any other business. There is little or no oversight of the nation's over 4,000 colleges and universities that enroll over 17 million students. There are some colleges, such as Grove City College and Hillsdale College, that do a fine job of undergraduate education. Useful information about what colleges are doing what can be found in the Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute's "Choosing the Right College" (http://isi.org/college_guide/choosing_right_college.html).

the tuition.  Parents have a responsibility to their children to see to it that they are educated in a manner that prepares them for a career, not flipping burgers.  I know that that wasn't always the norm and that college was a privilege, but now it is a necessity.  You can't make it in the world without some kind of degree and not helping your children with their education is selfish. 

That's not to say that the child shouldn't bear some responsibility in this.  He/she can certainly get a part-time job to help with books, living expenses, etc.  I see nothing wrong with the child taking out the standard student loan either, but dumping them out the door at 18 with nothing more than a high school education is not being a responsible parent.  Perhaps that's the problem today.  So many parents don't have time or are too selfish worrying about themselves to make sure their children are set.  It's not about money, it's about responsibility. 

Judging by your responses, I'd say your husband's divorce was quite bitter and perhaps the animosity you feel should be directed toward his ex-wife and not the children.  They obviously had no control over that money that was given to their mother.  While my children aren't ready for college yet, one thing I have learned already is that you never stop being a parent.