Posted: Monday, August 21, 2006 7:00 pm
Once upon a time, college advisers focused on helping students learn how to become independent and self-reliant.
They’re still doing that, but the nature of the job has changed. Today, part of the job is fending off parents who want to continue hovering over their children thanks to cell phones and e-mail.
“Helicopter parents” would do their offspring a favor by allowing them more room to make their own decisions — and feel the consequences — as the college year gets under way this fall.
How to handle helicopter parents has become the topic of seminars among college officials, as it was this summer, for example, at a meeting of the Nebraska Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
Some of the stories told about today’s millennium generation provoke chuckles in those who went away to college in an era when students might make a phone call home once a week, if that.
The University of Vermont has “student bouncers” whose job is to divert parents when they try to attend sessions with advisers at registration, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year.
University of Georgia Professor Richard Mullendore told the newspaper that students sometimes whip out their cell phones during a session with an adviser, speed dial their parents and hand over the phone, saying, “Here, talk to my mom.”
College professors report that it’s typical for students to whip out their cell phones after a test to report how it went. Who’s on the other end? Often, it’s Mom.
The cell phone has become “the world’s longest umbilical cord,” Mullendore said.
College officials said the trend began when the so-called millennial generation, those born after 1982, started arriving in college. “They have been the most protected and programmed children ever — car seats and safety helmets, play groups and soccer leagues, cell phones and e-mail,” Mark McCarthy of Marquette University told the Washington Post earlier this year.
The habit of hovering can raise eyebrows if it extends after college. A Boeing official was surprised when a recruit brought his mother to his job interview, the Wall Street Journal reported. A General Electric official received a phone call from a mom who tried to negotiate a higher salary for a potential recruit.
While parental support at an appropriate level can help sons and daughters avoid pitfalls and make better decisions, parents should let go — by degrees, perhaps — when students go off to college. Students need to develop their own abilities to assess risks, plan, resolve conflicts and take initiative.