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Interacting with Parent Relations Offices
What are your experiences – or expectations – when it comes to interacting with parent relations offices on college campuses? If you are the parent of a current college student, please tell your peer parents about your awareness of such offices, and what kinds of issues you have brought to their staffs’ attention. If you are the parent of a prospective college student, please share your expectations about the professionalism in these offices, and what problems you might want to get them involved in solving. Thank you for sharing your views in Hoverings: A Blog for Current and Future College Parents.
This entry was posted
on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 1:43 pm and is filed under College.
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October 19th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
My experiences have been good. My son attends Boston University and most of the information they publish is helpful. I just wish they could get me some discounted hotel rooms in Boston and some other ways to help manage the high cost of attendance.
October 20th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
I currently have daughter that is a junior at Canisius College. Canisius has a Student Relations Dept. that sent a letter to each of the parents early freshman year. They invited the parents to contact them anytime with concerns about their children, giving hours, an email address, phone number and name to contact. When my child seemed depressed and had stated a desire to transfer from the college, I contacted the office. They were a great support for me. They contacted my child without disclosing my concerns. They didn’t pressure her to communicate with them. By the end of freshman year, the decision my child made to stay was because of relationships she developed with the teachers and the Administration. Little did my kid know…and I am very thankful today as my she is a Deans List student and loves Canisius.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:32 am
I have had three opportunities to see how colleges interact with parents. Two were public and one was private. The best by far was Hillsdale College in Michigan. Hillsdale has 2 parent weekends per year, one in the spring and one in the fall. During parent weekends, parents have a chance to sit down with each of their student’s professors and get a chance to find out directly from the professor how the student is doing, whether they are attending class, how the grades are going, etc. This helped us head off early a potential problem with one of our children that could have caused them to have to leave the school. You also have a chance to interact with administrators and the leaders and air issues directly with them which is fantastic. The parents’ board there is considered an active partner with the university and not just another fundraising organization.
Both the University of North Carolina and NC State University (where our other two children have gone) do a pretty good job of getting information to parents using email and listservers. UNC tends to make parents feel as if they are primarily there to raise funds and other than one parents’ weekend in the fall where parents don’t have a lot of direct interaction with professors and administrators, there isn’t a lot of opportunity to really understand your student’s environment. Our other student is just a freshman at NC State, so we don’t have a lot of data points yet, but so far, the parent’s orientation and other events have been good.
October 21st, 2009 at 11:14 am
The parent relations offices are mainly the financial aid offices in the two colleges where my children have attended. My experience is that they have the nerve to keep pushing up tuition bills now to over $50,000–even in years when the endowment growth was booming–and then turn around and deny aid, while soliciting contributions from us as members of their “community!” Do they have any sense how warm and fuzzy we DON’T feel about them? I have even instructed my children that any time they feel an urge in the future to make an alumni donation, they should send it to me! These colleges are eating their seed corn by holding-up current students and their families.