What To Do When Your College Student Regrets Doing Two Degrees At Once From Different Universities
Last Sunday, I was folding college laundry on my living room couch when my 21-year-old son, Sam, dropped his beat-up laptop next to me, screen open to two overlapping degree audit pages from two different universities. He sat down hard, ran his hands through his hair that hasn’t been cut in three weeks, and said, “I messed up. I regret this so much, I don’t know how to keep going.”
Sam started his mechanical engineering degree at our in-state public university two years ago. Three months into his first year, he got an email about an accelerated online business degree from a private out-of-state university. If he finished it in two years alongside his engineering degree, he’d get it for 40% off regular tuition, and graduate with both degrees in four years instead of six. He came to us that Thanksgiving, all fired up: “I can get a job in renewable energy project management right out of college, no master’s needed. It makes so much sense.” We were impressed by his drive. We helped him run the numbers, co-signed the small payment plan he needed, and told him we were proud he was thinking ahead.
The first year, he made it work. He cut out his weekly gaming nights with his high school friends, stopped coming home every other weekend, and started pulling all-nighters once a week to get assignments done. We’d check in, he’d say he was fine, so we didn’t push. Second year, his engineering classes got harder: 15 credit hours plus a 6-hour lab every week. The online business degree ramped up to two 8-week classes at a time. Last month, he had a midterm for heat transfer and a final group project for his strategic management class due the same day. He missed the engineering midterm check-in by 15 minutes because he was finishing his business presentation, and got an automatic failing grade on the first half of the semester. That’s when he drove home Sunday morning and broke down.
The first thing I did that actually helped was not give him advice right away. I grabbed a big roll of butcher paper we had left over from my daughter’s birthday party, and a Sharpie, and told him to write down every single thing he has to do in a typical week, down to the 2-hour weekly commute between his off-campus apartment and campus, and his 5-hour a week work study at the campus machine shop. When we added it up, it was 71 hours of scheduled commitments a week. The average full-time job is 40. He just stared at the number for a minute, and said, “I didn’t realize it was that much.” For overloaded students, that step alone cuts through the brain fog of constant stress – you can’t adjust a load you can’t actually see.
A lot of people default to two extremes when a kid is in this spot: push through no matter what, or drop one degree immediately and write off all the work. We didn’t jump to either. Instead, we called the registrar’s office at the online university together, on speakerphone, right there at our kitchen table. That’s the trick most people miss: most schools don’t advertise flexible options upfront. We found out they allow students to put their degree on hold for up to three years, no extra fee, and all completed credits stay on your transcript forever. That middle ground took all the pressure off immediately. Sam didn’t have to choose between ruining his first degree or wasting all the time and money he already put in.
Next, we worked through the regret. Sam kept saying he wasted a year and a half of tuition, that he let us down, that he was a failure for biting off more than he could chew. Instead of telling him “it’s okay, don’t worry” which doesn’t actually help, I had him make a second list: everything he got out of the business classes he already took, even if he doesn’t finish right now. He wrote: learned basic accounting that helps me with my monthly budget, the project management class taught me how to organize my engineering lab reports, three of my business credits count as free electives for my engineering degree, so I don’t have to take that random geology elective I didn’t want. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like all that time and money was thrown away.
We ended up deciding he’d put the business degree on hold for three years. He’ll finish his engineering degree on schedule next spring, and if he still wants the business degree after he’s working a few years, his future employer will likely cover the remaining tuition as professional development. He cut back his work study from 5 hours to 2 hours a week, and he already started going to his weekly gaming nights again.
He still gets frustrated sometimes, when he sees the half-finished degree on his transcripts, and he says he still regrets jumping into it without mapping the actual work first. I don’t tell him it’s no big deal, because it was a really hard 18 months, and it set him back a little in some ways. We don’t have it all figured out, and he might still decide to go back for that business degree in a few years, or he might not. The biggest thing I’ve learned as a parent is that when your kid comes to you saying they regret something big, they don’t need a fancy motivational speech or a perfect fix. They just need help seeing their load clearly, finding the middle ground between all or nothing, and remembering that even a misstep doesn’t erase every good thing you picked up along the way.
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