From High School to College: When the Structure Disappears

One of the mistakes we make when deciding whether a student is ready for college is looking primarily at whether they can do college-level academic work. That certainly matters. If a student cannot read, write, reason, or understand the material required by the program, we have an academic problem. But some of the students I have seen struggle most dramatically in college were perfectly capable of doing the academic work.

What changed was everything around it.

For many students, high school provides an extraordinary amount of structure that becomes almost invisible because students have lived inside it for years. They wake up at roughly the same time, go to the same building, move through a predictable sequence of classes, see teachers regularly, receive reminders, and return home at a fairly consistent time. Parents, teachers, counselors, coaches, and school systems are all participating in the management of the student's life whether anyone calls it executive functioning support or not.

Then we celebrate graduation, send the student to college, and remove much of it.

The Academic Work May Not Be the Biggest Change

College courses can certainly be harder than high school courses, but the structure of the work may be the more important change for some students. A professor may meet with a student twice a week and expect substantial work to happen between those meetings. A paper can be assigned a month in advance with few intermediate deadlines. Attendance may or may not be closely monitored. A student can have five different syllabi, five different sets of expectations, and long stretches of time in which nobody is telling them what to do.

For students who are strong self-managers, this freedom can be wonderful. For students who relied heavily on external structure, the same freedom can expose difficulties that were much less visible in high school.

This is particularly relevant for students with ADHD and learning differences, but it is not limited to students with diagnoses. Research involving first-year college students with ADHD and/or learning disabilities has documented meaningful differences in areas related to engagement, preparation, expectations, and psychosocial functioning compared with peers. Other work examining college students with ADHD has found executive functioning, particularly aspects such as organization and motivation, relevant to academic and overall functioning. The transition changes the environment in ways that can make those skills matter more.

High School Success Can Hide Weak Systems

A student can earn excellent grades in high school without having particularly strong independent systems.

Perhaps a parent checks the online gradebook every evening. A teacher accepts late work after reminding the student three times. The school provides a study hall. The student does homework at the kitchen table while a parent cooks dinner. Their backpack is a disaster, but a friend texts them when something is due. None of those supports are inherently bad. In fact, some of them are exactly what a student needs.

The problem occurs when we mistake successful performance inside a highly supported environment for evidence that the student can independently reproduce the same performance in a very different one.

I have seen students arrive at college with transcripts that suggest they should be completely fine and discover within weeks that they have never really managed their own time, monitored their own work, or recovered from falling behind without an adult stepping in. Their academic ability did not disappear during orientation. The scaffolding did.

More Freedom Means More Decisions

College students make an enormous number of small decisions that high school often makes for them. When should I wake up? Do I go to class if attendance is not required? When should I eat? When do I study? Which assignment should I do first? Is four hours between classes enough time to go back to the residence hall? Should I start the paper tonight or tomorrow? How much studying is enough?

Individually, none of these decisions seems particularly complicated. Collectively, they require planning, time management, prioritization, working memory, initiation, self-monitoring, and flexibility.

This is why I think "independence" is sometimes a misleading goal. We talk as though independence means removing support. I would rather think about it as transferring responsibility. The student gradually becomes the person making more of the decisions, even while support remains available.

If we remove support before the student has developed the systems it was compensating for, we have not created independence. We have created exposure.

Parents Have to Change Jobs

This transition can be difficult for parents too. In high school, a parent may have direct access to grades, teachers, attendance records, and assignment portals. They can see a problem developing and intervene.

College changes both the practical and legal relationship. The student is expected to communicate with professors, seek assistance, manage deadlines, and make academic decisions. Even when parents remain deeply involved, they cannot simply continue doing the same job they did in high school.

I do not think the answer is to disappear. The idea that parents should drop a student at college and immediately stop helping has never made much sense to me. Most young adults continue to rely on family for advice, perspective, and support.

The job, however, needs to shift from manager toward consultant. Instead of checking whether the assignment was submitted, ask the student how they are keeping track of assignments. Instead of emailing the professor, help the student think through what they want to say. Instead of building the weekly schedule, sit beside them while they build it.

That transition is rarely perfectly smooth. Parents are learning to let go at the same time students are learning to take over.

Support Should Move With the Student

Students who received support in high school sometimes assume that college accommodations or disability services will simply reproduce what they had before. Postsecondary systems are different, and students generally need to take a more active role in requesting and using support.

Beyond formal accommodations, students may also benefit from tutoring, academic coaching, advising, counseling, structured study environments, or other campus resources. The important thing is not to wait until the student is failing to discover what exists.

Research on the transition of students with ADHD and learning disabilities has repeatedly emphasized the challenges involved in moving from secondary to postsecondary education and the importance of appropriate support. The evidence for specific approaches such as executive function coaching has historically been more limited than the enthusiasm for them, which is worth acknowledging. Support should be thoughtful and individualized rather than based on the assumption that one model works for everyone.

Practice Before the Stakes Are Higher

If a student is still in high school, I would rather discover weaknesses in their systems while there are adults nearby to help them adjust.

Let them manage more of their own schedule. Have them communicate directly with teachers when appropriate. Ask them to keep track of upcoming deadlines rather than having a parent announce them. Let them make a planning mistake and work through the consequence. If they use a planner, calendar, reminder system, or app, make sure they are the person actually maintaining it.

This does not mean manufacturing failure to teach a lesson. It means shifting responsibility gradually enough that we can see what happens.

A student who forgets an assignment because a parent stopped checking the portal has taught us something useful. Perhaps the student needs a better system for capturing assignments. A student who repeatedly underestimates how long work will take may need practice with time estimation. A student who knows everything that is due but cannot decide what to do first may need work on prioritization rather than organization.

"Executive functioning" becomes much more useful when we stop treating it as one giant skill and identify the specific places where the student's system breaks down.

College Readiness Is More Than Academic Readiness

When parents ask whether a student is ready for college, I think we should broaden the conversation. Can the student do the academic work? Absolutely. But can they wake themselves up, get where they need to go, keep track of responsibilities, ask for help, manage medication if they take it, handle money at a basic level, recover when a plan fails, tolerate a disappointing grade, and recognize when a small problem is becoming a larger one?

Nobody does all of these things perfectly at eighteen. Plenty of adults do not do all of them perfectly at forty-five. Readiness is not perfection.

The question is whether the student has enough skills, self-awareness, and support to keep learning how to manage greater independence without the entire system collapsing when something goes wrong.

This is also why I am interested in technology that supports executive functioning without taking ownership away from the student. Tanglio can help organize coursework, bring assignments and deadlines together, support planning and prioritization, and help break down larger tasks. The student still has to make decisions, do the work, communicate with people, and live the life around the calendar.

The goal is not to recreate high school on a phone. It is to help students build some of the structure that high school used to provide for them.

I have spent much of my career watching students exceed what other people expected of them when the environment and support were right. College should not require students to prove their independence by struggling without support. It should give them an opportunity to become more independent by learning how to use support well, understand themselves, and gradually take greater ownership of their lives.

That is a much more useful definition of being ready for college.