Why Universities Avoid Responsibility and What Parents Can Do When They Do
The word “responsibility” came up eleven times during the forty-minute meeting, and no one on the other side of the table seemed willing to take any of it back to their office. We were sitting in a small conference room at a public university, talking about my daughter’s first semester. She had failed a required course, missed almost half the semester, and only found out she was in trouble when the final grades posted.
The academic advisor explained that my daughter had been sent two emails about her missing assignments. “At this level, students need to advocate for themselves,” she said, sliding a printed email chain across the table. “We can’t force them to read what we send.”
I asked who had noticed that my daughter had stopped showing up to class. The advisor looked at the student success coordinator, who looked at someone from the dean’s office, who said, “That’s really the professor’s area.” The professor wasn’t in the room.
Nobody was in the room. That was the problem.
My daughter had registered for a class despite missing a prerequisite that nobody had flagged. The online system let her enroll. The advisor assumed the system would catch it. The professor assumed the advisor had checked. The disability office had approved her accommodations, but my daughter hadn’t followed through on requesting them from each professor, because she had just been diagnosed with anxiety and didn’t want to announce it to strangers. She stopped going to lectures. She stopped opening her inbox. The emails piled up in an unread folder.
We had expected a university to act like a school: if a kid starts slipping, someone calls home, someone schedules a meeting, someone checks in. But universities are not schools. They are more like airports. Many separate systems are running at the same time, and a student is just a passenger moving between them. The check-in agent doesn’t know what the security screener did. The gate staff doesn’t know if the terminal bathroom was cleaned. And when a flight is missed, the airline points to weather, air traffic control, and the passenger’s own decision to buy a non-refundable ticket.
At least airlines have a customer service line. Universities have no central person responsible for student outcomes.
That afternoon, I tried a different question. “If my daughter does everything you all suggest from now on, and she still falls through the cracks, who reviews what happened?”
The student success coordinator shifted in her chair. “We have an appeals process,” she said slowly. “But it’s not about blame. It’s about grade changes.”
I told her I wasn’t asking about the grade. I was asking about the system. She said, “We don’t have a system for that.”
I believe her. But that doesn’t make it acceptable.
What I’ve learned since then is that universities protect themselves with a very basic idea: the student is an adult. Legally, that’s true. But most first-year students are not adults in the way the university pretends. They haven’t built the skills to track down a missing prerequisite, read a syllabus, or ask a professor for an extension. They are freshly out of settings where every adult in the building had some level of responsibility for them. Then they arrive somewhere where the exact opposite is true, and the one time they struggle, every office explains why it wasn’t their job to notice.
Parents can’t change the whole university. But there are a few things that actually help.
The first thing is the release form. A FERPA release sounds bureaucratic, but it makes a real difference. If your student signs one at the registrar’s office, you stop being a stranger on the phone. You can sit in meetings, ask direct questions, and read the same documents your student sees. Without it, universities will hide behind privacy laws to avoid uncomfortable conversations. They will say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t discuss your daughter’s record with you.” That sounds reasonable until you realize it’s also convenient.
The second thing is the phrase, “Who specifically owns this problem?” Use it in every meeting. Ask for a name. Ask for a title. If nobody can give you one, ask who the professor reports to. Ask who the advisor reports to. Climb the chain until someone says, “That would be me.” Then you have a person.
The third thing is the summary email. At the end of any meeting, say, “Could you send me a short email summarizing what we talked about? I want to make sure my daughter follows everything correctly.” This changes things. When people have to write down what they promised, they promise less. But they also start doing what they said. The email becomes a paper trail. It’s not aggressive. It’s just there, and it makes vague answers harder to stick.
We started doing all of this after that first meeting. My daughter signed a release. I called the dean’s office and asked for the name of the person who handled outreach for struggling students. The woman on the phone said, “That varies.” I asked what her name was. She told me. Then I asked if she could help me find the right person. She transferred me to a different office. The person there gave me the name of someone in the college advising center. I emailed that person. She actually replied. She actually knew my daughter’s name. She had a caseload, not just a contract.
The tone changed after that. The advisor and the student success coordinator became more precise in their emails. They stopped using phrases like “we will support her” and started writing things like “we will review her progress on Monday and email you by Friday.” They were still cautious. But suddenly the responsibility had a shape and a timeline.
I don’t think that was because they had a sudden change of heart. I think it was because someone was watching, and because once a parent enters the conversation with a written record, university staff have more reasons to protect themselves. That’s not a beautiful thing, but it’s a useful one.
The truth is that universities cannot be held accountable the way schools or small businesses can. They are too large, too bureaucratic, and too protected. The staff members who work with students are often overloaded and sincere, but they report to departments that are rated on things like graduation rates and retention percentages, not on whether one student in the middle of a mental health crisis felt supported. The system is not designed to fail on purpose. It is designed to serve groups. Individuals sometimes get lost.
My daughter eventually withdrew from that semester and came back the next year with a different schedule, different housing, and a list of names to contact if things started falling apart. She still doesn’t love the university. She still expects to have to advocate for herself. But now she knows that “we can’t force students to read email” is code for “we didn’t have a process for seeing who was drowning.”
I don’t know if any university will ever fully accept responsibility for what happens after a student signs up. But I know that when one human being knows your student’s name, and when you have a paper trail that says what that human being promised, the responsibility becomes a little harder to pass along. It doesn’t fix the whole system. It just gives you someone to call when it doesn’t work. Some days, that’s the best you can do.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Universities Avoid Responsibility and What Parents Can Do When They Do