Time to take a deep breath.
Your kids are at William & Mary. It is a pressure cooker. Expectations are borderline ridiculous. Competition is fierce. Kids pretty much live with stress level red as their norm. No wonder the university invests so heavily in wellness.
What can you do to help?
Tell them to take a deep breath.
Tell them that their future does not depend on their exceeding, but instead depends on their surviving.
Tell them to break it all down into bite-size portions and prioritize.
Tell them to work backwards: what is the least amount of work required to simply make a C. Then figure out how much more effort it will take to make a B. Then figure out what it would take to make an A.
If they start off trying to make all A’s, they are simply setting themselves up for failure, especially as freshmen and sophomores. When they find their passion, when they find a major that suits their interests, the grades will come more naturally. Until then, it’s a matter of managing expectations of reasonable outcomes and reasonable efforts. The worst thing is for them to feel they have to be going full-tilt all the time, chasing an unrealistic goal. They will have a much better chance of succeeding if they work their way up from a solid foundation.
So, tell them to take a break, take a breath, take a walk.
Make sure they get some downtime over fall break so they can go back recharged.
As long as we can help them from burning themselves out, they can, and will, survive this place, just as 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of others before them. And they will go out into this world, equipped and enabled to make a difference.
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