We're not in Kansas any more Toto!
It's a tossup whether collisions between work and school or between family and school are the most common disruptors of student acdemic careers. Collisions between school and recreational schedules (i.e. skiing, soccer, rugby, kayaking) are a distant third in this race.
Since I can't possible do anything to help with unpredicatable family issues let's focus on the one which is at least partly under our control. The basic deal is this --- college coursework takes time outside of the classroom. How much time varies from class to class and student to student. Your instructors expect that you are willing to spend 2-3 hrs outside of class for every hour in a lower division (less than 300 level) class. For a 4 credit class, where you have 4 academic hours in class, this means that you might well be spending 8-12 hrs studying, writing papers, preparing for tests, and other tasks. Carrying this through it means that if you are taking a full course load of 17 credits (this is the presumed load of a student planning to complete a 4 yr degree in 4 years) you might very well be doing 40 hrs of coursework outside of class each week. This, combined with your actual class time, gives a total time committment of 57 hrs a week for school and you haven't slept, brushed your teeth, or commuted to school. Not much time for work in there.
Even at a 12 credit load, if you are in courses which really expect you to work hard outside of class, you are looking at a roughly 40 hr school week. This is why the usual recommendation for students who are working 20 hrs a week or more is that they take 12 credits or less.You still won't have a social life but you'll make it. Lest you think this is all a scare tatic I hasten to assure you that there are a number of classes in the science department where student surveys have confirmed that the average student spends easily 12 hrs a week and sometimes 20 hrs a week outside of class. There are also some of the other kind of class on campus where the workload is generally much less. Be sure you know what you're getting into before you jump.
A word of warning -- Fall term in particular many of the courses you take will start of slowly as we bring all the students up to a common starting point. Usually things start to ramp up in mid to late October. It may seem like you've been having plenty of time to get your work done and then all of a sudden things change. Midterms and term papers start cropping up in a number of your classes, your work needs you for extra time to prep for the holiday season or ski season, and you just met a really cool person. Things can come unravelled in an alarming hurry and all of the faculty at COCC have experienced seeing exhausted students in November who wonder how they are going to make it through the end of the term successfully. You don't want to have this experience if you can help it so think ahead especially your first term.