When Your Teen Regrets Doing Two Degrees From Two Universities: Practical Things We Tried
It’s 9:15 on a Tuesday, and I’m knocking on my 20-year-old daughter Lila’s bedroom door, holding a fresh mug of hot tea to replace the cold coffee she left on her desk an hour earlier. The door’s ajar, so I push it open, and I find her slouched in her desk chair, three screens open: one to her environmental science lab portal at the state university, one to her creative writing degree dashboard at the private online college an hour away, and one to a blank Google doc that’s supposed to be her midterm personal essay. She looks up, and her eyes are red, and she says it plain: “I regret this. I shouldn’t have started both.”
Lila was the kid who wrote climate zines out of our garage starting at 16, who got 5s on all five of her AP classes senior year, who couldn’t pick between her two passions: she wanted to do the lab work to protect wetland ecosystems, and she wanted to write stories about the people fighting to save those ecosystems. The state uni had one of the top env sci programs in the region, and the private college had a low-residency part-time writing degree that fit perfectly around her in-person class schedule, or so we all thought. She talked about it for six months, crunched the numbers on her part-time barista pay, asked if we’d co-sign the small student loan for the second degree. We asked if she was sure she could handle the workload, she said she’d handled harder in high school, and we said okay. It was her call, and we supported it.
The first two months looked fine on paper. She turned all her assignments in on time, she still came down for dinner most nights. But little things started to slip: she quit her weekly campus book club, she stopped baking chocolate chip cookies on the weekends like she’d done since she was 12, she missed her little sister’s first varsity soccer game because she was cramming for a quiz. I asked her once if she wanted to talk about it, she said she was just getting used to the rhythm, it would get better. Then midterm season hit, and the cracks showed. She had an in-person lab practical on the exact same day she had to attend a mandatory writing residency two hours away. She begged both professors for extensions; one gave her a full extension, the other knocked half a letter grade off for turning it in late. That C on her lab report was the first bad grade she’d ever gotten, and that’s when she broke.
I sat down on the end of her bed that night, next to the laundry basket full of dirty hoodies, and didn’t say anything for a few minutes while she cried. As a parent, I’ve always been proud of Lila’s ambition, but I realized that night I’d missed a key question I never thought to ask: it’s not just whether you can handle double the coursework, it’s whether you can handle the extra friction of doing it at two completely different universities. Two different registration systems, two different semester schedules, two different email inboxes to check every day, two different sets of rules for attendance and deadlines. Switching your brain from writing lab reports to writing personal essays is hard enough, without having to switch between portals, log into two different student accounts, and keep track of two separate holiday breaks. That hidden admin work adds up to way more than anyone expects, and it drains the joy right out of both degrees.
The next night, we ordered her favorite pork dumplings from the place down the street, sat down at the kitchen table, and didn’t talk about “hustling through” or “you started it so you have to finish it.” We just wrote down all her options in plain black and white, and then made three small changes to take some pressure off immediately, no matter what she decided long-term.
First, we added a 15-minute “admin sync” to our Sunday night routine. Every Sunday at 7pm, me or her dad sit with her for 15 minutes, pull up both university calendars, and sync all deadlines and meetings into one single shared Google calendar. We add a reminder three days before every big deadline, sort all unread emails from both schools into labeled folders, and throw out any old syllabi she doesn’t need anymore. That cut out the 2-3 hours a week she spent digging through two inboxes trying to find a missing announcement she knew she’d seen somewhere.
Second, we shuffled chores to free up just 25 minutes a day for her. Lila was in charge of walking our golden retriever every morning before class, which ate up that half hour she could have used to sleep in or grab breakfast on the way to campus. My 16-year-old son, who already gets up early to play Fortnite with his friends, agreed to take over the morning walk for an extra $20 a month out of my grocery budget. That small change makes a huge difference in how rushed she feels every morning.
Third, we mapped out all the exit ramps, even if she didn’t want to use them. We pulled up each university’s leave of absence policy together, wrote down exactly how much it would cost to pause one degree for a year, how much she’d get refunded, and that she wouldn’t lose her spot in the program if she came back. Just having that information written down, instead of it being this scary unknown hanging over her, took most of the panic away.
It’s been two weeks since that night, and Lila hasn’t made a final decision yet. Some days she still says she regrets starting both, but some days she says she still wants to make it work. She made it to my younger daughter’s soccer game last Saturday, and she even baked those chocolate chip cookies on Sunday afternoon. She’s sticking with the 10pm hard stop on school work we set, and leaves her phone outside her room to charge so she doesn’t lay awake stressing about deadlines.
There’s no perfect fix right now, and I don’t know if she’ll end up pausing that second degree or pushing through. But what I know is this: regret when you’re 20 isn’t a failure. It’s just information that you tried something, and it’s harder than you thought. You don’t have to have it all figured out, and you don’t have to power through something that’s sucking the joy out of the things you love. Right now, this is working for us: small, weekly changes, clear options, and letting her take as much time as she needs to decide what comes next.
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