What To Do When Your College Student Regrets Taking Two Degrees At Once From Different Universities
It’s 7 p.m. on a Sunday, I’m folding clean laundry on the couch, and my 20-year-old daughter Lila is staring at her laptop screen, a half-eaten bowl of blue box mac and cheese going cold beside her. Her golden retriever puppy is chewing the corner of a notebook full of bio lab notes, and I can see two different student portals open on her screen—one for her in-state public university, one for the private online art school 300 miles away. “Mom,” she says, not looking up, “I regret this. I don’t know why I thought I could do both.”
Lila’s always been the kid who took five AP classes in senior year and still made time to paint murals on the school’s bathroom walls. When she graduated, she got into the state’s top biology program (she’s wanted to work in conservation since she was 12, when she helped band birds at our local wildlife refuge) and got a partial scholarship to the private art school’s illustration BFA. She sat across from us at the kitchen table that May, two acceptance letters spread out, and said combining both would make her unbeatable for conservation grad programs. No one else would have a biology degree and a full art degree, she said. My husband and I were impressed. We didn’t push back. We figured she’d always handled a heavy load, so why stop her?
First semester went okay, sort of. She texted once a week complaining about remembering two different deadline schedules, but she got all A’s and B’s, so we figured it was just normal college growing pains. Second semester, her bio stats class overlapped with her art’s weekly critique, she had to miss three critiques to take lab quizzes, and she started pulling all-nighters to make up the work. She stopped coming home most weekends because she didn’t have time to drive the two hours. When she did come home for Thanksgiving, she fell asleep on the couch before we even finished dinner. Last month, she failed her first midterm ever—stats—and got a C on her semester art portfolio, the one she’d been working on since August. She called me crying in her car after grades posted, and I drove up to get her that night.
I’ve talked to a couple other parents whose kids tried this, and most of us miss the thing that makes two degrees from two different schools so much harder than a double major at one school: it’s not just the extra class work, it’s the extra everything. Lila spends 5 to 6 hours a week just on admin: logging into two different systems, tracking two different add/drop dates, emailing two different registrar offices when a transcript gets lost, remembering two different formatting rules for essays. No one talks about that when you’re signing up. It’s constant context switching that wears you down long before the actual coursework does.
When Lila finally got all her frustration out that Sunday, we didn’t jump in with the two common answers people give: either “just quit one now, it’s not worth it” or “push through, you’re already halfway there.” Instead, we did the first concrete thing that helped: we cleared off the kitchen table, got a big roll of butcher paper, and mapped every single requirement out by hand. We wrote down every remaining credit she needed for each degree, when each required class was next offered, what the tuition would be for each semester, and even added a line for the 5 hours a week of extra admin. By the end of the night, we could see the problem plain as day: she was carrying 18 credits a semester to finish both in four years, which left zero room for anything that didn’t fit the rigid plan, and she was on track to graduate with 30 extra credits that she didn’t need anyway.
Next, we did the second thing that helped: we called the grad advisor for the conservation program Lila wanted to attend, and asked a straight question: do you actually need two full degrees to get in? The advisor laughed a little and said no—most of their strongest applicants have a biology degree and a strong portfolio, and a minor in art is just as good as a full second degree. No one cares about the second degree if the work is good. That took a lot of the pressure off. Lila had assumed she needed the full degree to be taken seriously, but that wasn’t true at all.
Then we checked the fine print on both schools’ policies, something most kids don’t do before they sign up. The art school allowed a one-year leave of absence with no extra fees and no loss of her spot or her scholarship. Six of her completed art credits transferred to the state university to count toward an art minor. That meant she could drop down to 12 credits a semester, finish her biology degree in a year, and still take one art class a semester at the state school to keep building her portfolio.
Lila decided to take the leave of absence. It’s been a month now, and she still has bad days. Last week she texted me a screenshot of an art classmate’s final show post on Instagram, and said she felt like a quitter for stepping back. But yesterday she called me after her stats quiz, and she said she studied for a whole week, got a B+, and had time to go hiking with her puppy after. She painted a little landscape of the trail that night, just for fun, something she hasn’t done in a year and a half.
We don’t know what’s going to happen. She might go back to finish the art degree after she graduates from bio, she might get a job and keep painting on her own, she might decide the minor is enough. It’s not the perfect plan she had two years ago, and the regret still nags at her sometimes. But for right now, it’s working. She’s not burning out, she’s still moving toward her goal, and she has time to breathe again. If your kid is in this spot, you don’t have to fix it all at once, and you don’t have to make them stick to a plan that’s breaking them. Just map it all out, ask the people who actually know what credentials matter, and take it one semester at a time.
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