This is a note for those who have (or are) current or upcoming college freshmen. This semester, I’ve had more freshmen students than ever before who stopped coming to class early on, but who then never actually withdrew from the class. This is terrible, because it means they paid full tuition for the class, and will receive an F, rather than a W, on their transcript.
I’m not sure why this happened so much this semester, but I suspect it’s a breakdown in communications. The students didn’t respond to any of my follow-up messages checking in on them, and I’m guessing they just didn’t read their university e-mail, and missed both my messages and the official university notices about the drop / add / withdrawal deadlines.
I’m honestly not sure what else the university could reasonably be doing to get the message to these students. I know there’s a proliferation of communication channels, and we’re all overwhelmed by them — I certainly sometimes lose track of e-mail / FB messages / texts / Slack / etc. and so on.
But this is a significant amount of money, so I wanted to give parents a heads-up that this seems to be becoming a widespread problem.