College Parents of America operates with a premise that every student wants to succeed.  We also believe that part of your role as a parent is to help your student to succeed frequently as the school year begins, and to aid him or her in attaining a higher level of performance throughout the academic year.

For students who are serious about success, there are 10 factors that come into play.  Each factor is interdependent and is directly related to the positive outcomes that students seek.  The most successful students constantly work to improve and strengthen all of these factors, so that they work in concert to improve performance.

The 10 factors that can propel students to greater success are:

1. Developing clear goals and capturing them in writing;
2. Creating a plan to meet those goals with specific steps, clear priorities and a timetable;
3. Building a network of people to provide on-the-ground support;
4. Gaining the knowledge necessary to provide a foundation in a field of interest;
5. Leveraging that knowledge to begin to develop a set of skills;
6. Showing determination to overcome obstacles;
7. Moving beyond a comfort zone and beginning to learn the value of taking risks;
8. Displaying a positive mindset that creates inner confidence and external momentum;
9. Gathering resources, such as study tools, and assembling them for wise use; and
10. Making good choices when presented with key decisions.

College Parents of America believes that every college student can be successful, but that the most successful students should recognize, understand and utilize the factors described above to improve their chances.

Your role is to encourage your student to understand and work on these critical factors of success.  However, you must remember that you can’t force your children to be successful.  They have to do the heavy lifting themselves; you can’t do it for them.

As you make your student aware of the factors for success, you should encourage him or her to constantly strive to improve, but resist the urge to badger if progress is not as fast as you would like.  If you offer positive reinforcement, and unconditional love, then progress will surely come, and you will have much to celebrate.

For at least 18 years, you have probably considered yourself to be your student’s principal advisor.  You have been there every step of the way, literally from the first steps taken, and then on to the first words spoken, the first tests taken, and the first degrees granted.  You probably didn’t have any “training” to be a parent, but somehow you figured it out.

Now, or when college classes begin, there should be another advisor assigned to help your student, and he or she is likely to be professionally trained.  As you step back, you should encourage your student to build a relationship with this academically skilled person who will be working with him/her for the next four years or however long it takes until graduation.

Similar to the situation with orientations, there is no one-size-fits-all model when it comes to advising.  Some schools have a group advising pattern, where a student rarely gets one-on-one time with the advisor, but does have an opportunity to meet in a group setting with both the professional and with peers.

Other schools have a tiered approach, sometimes called a “divisional model,” in which there is little, if any, personalized substantive exposure to the adviser in the freshman or sophomore year, but a great deal of exposure, and an opportunity for a relationship, that may develop down the road.

But the approach you are likely to get is fairly straightforward: a professional individual who is assigned to have an advising relationship with your son or daughter from Day One but probably only for Year One.  This could be someone who is advising for the first time, perhaps a grad student or a teaching assistant.  Or it could be someone who has been at this advising role for decades, perhaps since you were in college yourself.

It’s hard to say which individual profile will be better for your student, and it’s even harder to try to make a switch, so don’t bother.

Don’t you agree that even the very worst situations can be a lesson for your son or daughter?  Down the road, in a profession or chosen career, he or she will likely be forced to interact with people who are “assigned” to him/her and that’s just the way it will be: no questions asked.  In the same way, it’s a good “life lesson” now for your son or daughter to be able to work effectively with an assigned advisor.

College orientations vary in style and substance from college to college, but most have an overriding goal in mind: to prepare your student for success.

That is something to keep in mind throughout the college years. Colleges and universities really want your student to have a fulfilling higher education experience, and to graduate on time.

Orientations are when your family’s relationship with your chosen institution starts, and so it is important for both sides in the new relationship to take this event seriously and to try to learn as much from it as possible.

Some orientations are in the summer or, more accurately, several times in the summer, allowing for the greatest participation possible by incoming members of the freshman class and their families. These are often two- to three-day events that have the feel of a professional conference, with plenary session speakers such as the college president or provost, and breakout offerings dealing with various aspects of academic and campus life.

Often, these summer sessions, or their early fall equivalent, will have a breakout session for parents, or even an entire parallel track, running an equivalent length with student orientation and intersecting only in the case of certain speakers or for group entertainment.

A small, but growing, number of institutions have begun to offer an off-campus “pre-orientation” program for students, also during the summer, but usually held at a nearby nature preserve or other place where students can experience some life in the outdoors and get to know their fellow classmates a bit better.

Nearly all schools are in the business of presenting a special freshman orientation in the few days before school starts or, at minimum, during “move-in” time on campus.

What these sessions will usually prove is that just as you and your student have been diligently preparing for college, so too have university administrators. They will also prove that these very same administrators are people just like you, with their own hopes and fears about the school year, and sometimes with their very own children going through the college transition process.

The specific topics and tone of an orientation will often mirror the culture of the college or university. Beyond the usual welcome speeches, and chances to share your new college parenthood with your peers, there may, in fact, be a fair amount of “testing” that your student is asked to do by the institution.

These may include:

• equipment tests, i.e. making sure that electronic devices on campus are properly connected to university systems;
• placement tests, helping to ensure that your student is assigned to the right mix of classes; and
• attitudinal tests, information from which is almost always anonymous and which is used by schools to improve the way in which they do things the next time around, either at orientation itself or in an upcoming school term.

Placement tests for classes are worthy of special note, as sometimes students, with encouragement by their parents, intentionally do poorly on such tests in hopes that may result in an “easier” workload in the fall or spring semester. Tanking on purpose in such a test, or in any context for that matter, is never a smart idea.

In fact, this is as probably a good time as any to address honor, specifically the honor code that most colleges and universities live by. Sometimes such an honor code is engrained deeply in the culture of an institution and enforced by the students themselves; the University of Virginia honor code comes to mind. At most schools, the honor code is always there, but it lives in the background of the institution. At all schools, the honor code should be followed by new and returning students, so purposefully blowing a placement test would be a very big mistake.

At orientation sessions, other issues will be dealt with too, such as polices regarding cars on campus, how to deal with roommates, health and safety concerns and access to community service opportunities. But before you and your student know it, orientation will be a blip on the radar and it will be time – finally – to start classes.

College Parents of America (CPA) often finds itself in the position of defending parents and our behavior in support of our college-aged, or soon to be college-aged, children.

Let’s be honest, some small percentage of us may go over the edge and try to do too much in support of, or on behalf of, our kids. Examples of this behavior are filling out the college application itself or writing an application essay in the pre-college years, or calling a professor about a grade or e-mailing a residence hall advisor to settle a roommate dispute during the in-college years.

Unfortunately, that small percentage of parents who do engage in over-the-top and intrusive activities tend to get the lion’s share of attention from college officials and some members of the media.

I am convinced that most current and future college parents simply love their children and want to do whatever they can to support their children’s activities on the road to and through college. That’s why the mission of our organization is to empower you as parents to best support your children on that path, by helping you to understand, prepare for, protect and maximize your family’s college investment.

As I tell news organizations on a regular basis, it is important to note that, as a society, we have gained a near-universal consensus in support of the importance of parents being involved with and supportive of their children in the K-12 school years.

This involvement is encouraged because a wide body of research shows that the children of supportive parents are more likely to continue in school, to succeed in and finish high school, and to go on to college.

So with that as a given, it is unrealistic, in my view, to then ask parents to suddenly turn off that involvement at the college campus gates.

Let me know if you think that I am off-base, but I believe that, in general, today’s parents tend to:

• have children later in life;
• have fewer children than back in the day;
• provide, or strive to provide, a “best of” support system for their kids, whether it be an academic tutor, a SAT/ACT coach, a bevy of ballet lessons or a commitment to a travel youth sports team.

As a result, we parents have developed a tremendous emotional – and monetary – investment in our children, and we are interested in and concerned about what is going with that investment.

And rightly so, as every autumn more than 2 million young people in this country are first-year students at an institution of higher education, and by the following fall more than a third of those students are no longer attending those institutions, either because it was specifically the wrong school or because they had experienced academic, physical or emotional problems to an extent that higher ed, in general, was no longer in the immediate realm of possibility.

High stakes indeed, so no wonder families want to “hover,” as “helicopter parents” are prone to do, around their children.

One final point: I am not happy that the term “helicopter parent” has seemed to take on such a negative connotation.

After all, we humans use helicopters to perform some important and essential jobs. Traffic reporters use choppers to help us keep an eye on local roads and to suggest alternate routes if our commute becomes clogged. Emergency personnel use helicopters to perform search and rescue operations, and those individuals certainly value the fact that these mechanical birds can hurtle into the sky on a moment’s notice, flying whenever and wherever it is necessary.

Analogous to the examples above, I think that parents can and should keep a watchful eye on their children, and that they can and should be there in case an emergency should arise. But as you well know, the young adult in your family will, in the end, make his or her choices when it comes to choice of major, choice of friends and choice of career.

Helicopter pilots, and the crews they carry on their missions, perform important and sometimes heroic tasks. So too do “helicopter parents” on your mission to best support your children on the path to and through college. We wish you happy and successful piloting!

How does college work? Or put another way, how do colleges work and how can you and your student learn to adjust to their practices and achieve success?

Ultimately, of course, it is up to your student to find his/her way in the world. And his/her first step to a new world usually starts with college.

What do you think your child will be feeling on that first day of school? Probably not too different than you may have felt when you went through the same experience many years ago. However, if that is too far back to remember, then maybe it’s better to relate to the way you felt when you started your most recent job. A little apprehensive, a bit uncertain, but excited at the same time. And now, as a first-time college parent, it’s OK for you to feel that way again too.

And while your student may understandably be caught up in the moment, it’s your duty to take a step back and assess what needs to be done, and, with proper limits, to coach your son or daughter along the first and critical steps of the college journey.

One important fact for your family to recognize is that a college or university is populated by people who want the best for students, and whose favorite part of their job is actually working directly with students.

Now that claim of ours, of course, is not that different from the way you may have felt about those who worked at your student’s high school. Yet, with rare exceptions, this new institution of higher education will be, as it sounds, a step above high school in terms of number of people, number of separate departments and roles, and number of paths to navigate in order to make it to the finish line.

Some of the differences between high school and college will be stark, while others will be more subtle. And the same will apply to some of the differences between high school and college parenting.

One obvious difference between high school and college will be your access to information.

Throughout your student’s K-12 years, you undoubtedly had access to an incredible amount of information about his/her course of study, assignments and grades. In some school districts, the information spigot is turned on full blast and you can crunch as much data as you would like.

Well, get ready, because college is going to be very different, due to the Federal Educational Records Privacy Act, commonly known as “FERPA.” Ironically, FERPA was passed by Congress and signed into law in the 1970s, when some of us, those who are baby-boomers, were in college ourselves. The main goal of FERPA was to keep information away from Big Brother Government, but as it has been tweaked and applied over the years, and as it has been interpreted by many colleges and universities, the law has come to be seen as a way of protecting student information even from members of an immediate family, namely you.

So if you want to get your student’s grades, and/or health records and/or disciplinary records, then your student should sign a waiver allowing you access to that personal information. Some schools will provide you limited information without such a signed waiver, but most schools will provide you such information only in the case of an emergency. If the waiver is signed and properly filed with the college or university, then such concerns will melt away.

As you are probably reminded every day in your job or in other contexts, it’s one thing to have access to data, but it’s quite another thing to be able to interpret that data in a meaningful manner, and then to act on it in an appropriate way. That’s part of what our membership is all about. We encourage you to review our website, www.collegeparents.org, and to soak in as much information as you can. And please contact me at jboyle@collegeparents.org if you have any questions or concerns that I might address.