1. Living far from campus means a long commute, parking problems and then a long drive to work. If college life is limited to a job, classes and using your car as a trashed office, then dropping the classes will be easy. Without the campus life of hundreds of activity groups, campus jobs, campus research and social life, there is not much to quit.

2. Bad habits may come as a surprise dropout factor. You would think young college students would have the best record in maintaining their health but they rank near the bottom.

Once Mom and Dad are not around, kids are even more reckless with their diets, their exercise and their self-care. Skipping meals, sleep, or exercise makes getting sick more likely. Overdoses of salt, fat, sugar, and caffeine make you sleep poorly and feel tired and depressed.

Speaking of reckless, traffic accidents remain the biggest killer for this late teen group. Drinking is the most common factor in these accidents.

Drinking also has an added danger for college women. Fifty percent of women sexually assaulted on campus have been drinking at the time—making themselves more vulnerable—at least in the eye of the predator. And women in the college-age-and-pregnant group report they had been drinking at the time of the dream-ending mistake.

3. Bad management of time and money is a college danger because it's just as easy to squander your time on entertainment, partying and computer games as on the more familiar time-robbers of drugs and alcohol.

Money is the other side of the management problem. A freshman’s mailbox is filled with credit card offers that should be ignored. Ask your student to stay with a budget. Many families are in debt after their teen goes to college not because of college expenses but because of frivolous credit card rampages.

On the academic side, study time and class time will pay off in grades if the simple rules represented by SNAP are followed.

The "S" in SNAP stands for Show Up. The best predictor of low grades is number of classes missed. Almost all students who drop out begin the downhill slide by cutting classes.

The "N" in SNAP stands for Notes. With all the high school advice concerning taking notes you’d think it would be on the mind of every freshman. But few students take notes with any consistent plan and few can decipher their own shorthand when test time comes.

The "A" in SNAP stands for Active Studying. If reading is the assignment, get active, take reading notes. A yellow highlighter is just not enough practice. In 40 years of teaching, I never had a student flunk who could show me his or her reading notes.

The "P" in SNAP stands for Plan ahead. Poor time management can be a big pitfall for students on their own for the first time. Students need to schedule study time. Everybody needs party time and you can't plan every minute, but a calendar will keep the priorities in order and, along with the rest of SNAP, your student will be ready for the tests.