Do you guys have any tips for us struggling college students?
Yes.
find and talk to people who've already taken the class(es) you are struggling with, they can give you precious insight (resources to look up, parts of the curriculum to concentrate on). If there are study groups, use them and ask all the questions you need!
TALK TO YOUR PROFESSORS. I'm amazed that most people don't do this. Professors are generally quite happy to help you out with something you are struggling with; provided you show them that you did try to understand the thing in question, they'll generally happily give you tips, resources, explanations
following in the same vein: don't be afraid to ask for help. I studied at one of the toughest and highest ranked courses in my field and none of the top students was doing it on their own. They'd ask classmates for a hand with something they weren't getting, went to professors to have stuff explained again, consulted books, talked to older stundets
schedule and program your work. I know this is easier said than done because I'm a huge procrastinator, to the point where it got to be a problem for me in college. Every time I opened a book I felt like I had a mountain of stuff in front of me and I might as well put it off a little and go do something that felt less hopeless (even though I liked my course and did well in it!). That was because I had zero scheduling skills.
This is how I scheduled. Every course had either a textbook or a set of notes. That gave me the total pages that needed studying. Then I measured (something which you can do in about a week) the number of pages you can study effectively (meaning you'll remember the stuff) per hour. For me, that was a paltry 4 pages per hour (I studied physics so your mileage may vary); but that was fine. Then I measured the total number of hours per day that I could effectively study (meaning I wouldn't just be reading over stuff with my brain failing to memorize it); that came out to 5 hours per day, with a break every hour (yes, every hour). Then I built the schedule: total pages divided by pages per hour gives total hours. Total hours divided by hours (of study) per day gave the total days. I considered that I would only be able to study 5 days every week (because of a fair few extracurriculars and also life). That meant that those total days multiplied by seven fifths gave me the total days to finish the material. To that, I tacked on 3 extra days to do scramble review (read on).
Why did that work? because, having worked out exactly and realistically how much I needed to study each day, while giving myself time to do all the other things I wanted to do, I stopped feeling like each day I was taking a tiny speck of dust off a giant rock that needed smashing. I knew exactly how much rock I had to destroy and that I had a credible plan to do it.
Scramble review! Scramble review is a review format in which things are reviewed not in the order of presentation but in random order. That I found would help me make sure I could answer any question on the fly without having to first go through the motions of the previous concept(s).
That's about what I have, based on personal experience. My biggest issues in college were that I never asked for help even when it was abundantly available and that I wasn't scheduling worth a dam so I felt like studying was a hopeless endavour and ended up procrastinating. Fixing those problems enabled me to become more productive, less stressed and feeling like I was working (and worrying) less even if I produced more.