Iowamom23 posted:Some of this is deeply practical. A kid who is flunking out is less likely to come back to school — or pay tuition next semester. My parents both worked at a four-year, liberal arts college in our town when I was growing up and retention was a big topic of conversation. So I get that.
On the flip side, my mother ran the switchboard at the college. Every year we heard about the work study student whose mom called to say he wasn't really good at 8 a.m. and could she switch his shift to later in the day? Or the freshman who called to say she'd been on campus for two weeks and the maid hadn't stopped by to make her bed ONCE and when would she?
I do have to admit that I've kind of loved all the athletic apparatus making sure my son is doing what he needs to be doing — I have largely ceded his academics as well as his athletics to the university, while my friends whose kids have less academic support, or aren't in athletics, are calling to check on the status of Tuesday's paper and to remind their kid that finals are coming up.
I have no clue about those things and I love it.
There definitely is a practical interest for schools to keep students from failing out. Also a “humanitarian” interest—a lot of today’s students never learned to study or to juggle multiple challenging tasks (because their high school experience didn’t require them to). And for $50k or more per year in tuition, maybe it’s fair to expect colleges to provide some support services that they didn’t offer when tuition was much lower.
As for the special treatment some athletes get: They do have to deal with time pressures most students don’t face. On the other hand, too much tutoring and monitoring could be seen as coddling them. Taking off my grumpy old man hat for a moment, I do think today’s college students are less self reliant in many ways than in decades past; but they also face some pressures and challenges my fellow Gen Xers and I did not. Most 21st Century college grads do manage to become fully functioning adults.