When should parents intervene in college?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You can't intervene OP unless your children have signed away their privacy rights under FAFSA.

FERPA. You're not a very good lawyer.

You're right, I was actually thinking was it RESPA or FAFSA when posting. FAFSA for financial aid. FERPA for student privacy issues. RESPA, well you know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You can't intervene OP unless your children have signed away their privacy rights under FAFSA. This is the way college get around having to talk to parents. Once your kid is 18 and on campus - it's all your child's business even though you are footing the bill. If you try to contact a professor, the professor should either not respond or say that you are out of line and accoridng to FAFSA he or she can't talk to you. It was a precondition of us paying for college that both of our kids waived their FAFSA rights so we can intervene. You want to have that right especially in cases of emergency, illness, or crisis with campus or off campus police. Yes I am a lawyer.

I'm laughing because the previous post to yours mentions FERPA. What kind of lawyer are you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You can't intervene OP unless your children have signed away their privacy rights under FAFSA. This is the way college get around having to talk to parents. Once your kid is 18 and on campus - it's all your child's business even though you are footing the bill. If you try to contact a professor, the professor should either not respond or say that you are out of line and accoridng to FAFSA he or she can't talk to you. It was a precondition of us paying for college that both of our kids waived their FAFSA rights so we can intervene. You want to have that right especially in cases of emergency, illness, or crisis with campus or off campus police. Yes I am a lawyer.

I'm laughing because the previous post to yours mentions FERPA. What kind of lawyer are you?

One that has time only to read the OP question under "recent topics" and tries to help by speed typing answers. Sorry, I won't try to help anymore. Yes, it's FERPA. FAFSA is for financial aid. RESPA, which is what I deal in, is for Real Estate.

[Anonymous]

I taught at a college, am married to a professor, and most of my friends are professors.

100% -- ahead of cheating students, ahead of lying students, ahead of sexist students, ahead of dimwitted students -- the most unpleasant and dreaded we all talk about is dealing with parents. (A) we're not allowed to talk to them (doesn't stop them from talking to us) (B) they're almost always helicopter parents, their kids are usually B students, and try as I might not to punish the student for his parent's intervention, it's hard not to be annoyed and that annoyance unfairly reflects onto the student.

So, just don't do it. Drugs? Alcohol abuse? Failing every class? Sure, in those cases you might need to talk to your kid and maybe coordinate with the college -- but never, EVER the professor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I taught at a college, am married to a professor, and most of my friends are professors.

100% -- ahead of cheating students, ahead of lying students, ahead of sexist students, ahead of dimwitted students -- the most unpleasant and dreaded we all talk about is dealing with parents. (A) we're not allowed to talk to them (doesn't stop them from talking to us) (B) they're almost always helicopter parents, their kids are usually B students, and try as I might not to punish the student for his parent's intervention, it's hard not to be annoyed and that annoyance unfairly reflects onto the student.

So, just don't do it. Drugs? Alcohol abuse? Failing every class? Sure, in those cases you might need to talk to your kid and maybe coordinate with the college -- but never, EVER the professor.

+1000
former professor

[Anonymous]

Well, I wouldn't say that dealing with parents is the MOST unpleasant task, but it is one of the stickiest. Even after I explain FERPA rules.

And for the parent who required his student to sign a FERPA waiver--that's great, but it probably would not in any way change what I would do as a teacher. I would still refuse to discuss any specifics of grades or classroom performance, and would direct the parent to talk to the student directly.

[Anonymous]

My wife needs to back off my DD. She is pressing her to apply to transfer to a more prestigious school, and I can see she is trying to force this on my DD. DD has already had at least two fights with her mother about it. DD needs to find her own way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I got talking with a friend today - our kids are both freshmen - about our new relationship with our kids now that they've (mostly) flown the nest. Given the cost of college today, what is the line between helicoptering and legitimate intervention at the college level?

As anyone who has been through college knows, some professors are simply incompetent or complete and total dirtbags. I'm not talking about professors who are tough and challenging, but those where no learning takes place. Or worse grading is arbitrary and capricious with no relation to the work performed. So you can stick the class out and hope you pass or drop it and spend another semester/summer retaking the class, hopefully with a decent professor.

On the one side of the argument, college students are adults and should fight their own battles, and that they have to learn that sometimes life isn't fair and to deal with it. And that is a good argument.

On the other side however, college has become almost prohibitively expensive. If no learning is taking place, that money is wasted and sets the student up for problems in follow on classes. If dropping adds an extra semester, that's a big cost. And of course the college has no problem encouraging kids to drop classes and add a semester or year = more money.

And that sets the stage for the dilemma: As a parent you want your kids to deal with their own issues. But also as a parent (and taxpayer in the case of public colleges) you don't want to waste thousands/tens of thousands due to professor Dinghead.

Pretty much other than writing a check, there should be absolutely zero contact between a parent and administrators or educators at college, unless called because of a disciplinary issues by a Dean.

[Anonymous]

I'm the poster who didn't know RESPA, so thanks for clearing up that it's FERPA.

FWIW, I work in a PhD program and have had parents call me, the lowly admin, to ask how their doctoral students are doing. I try to very kindly explain that I cannot tell them anything, but also sometimes convey that I'm amazed that they ask. One of the callers was a professor herself!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So I was at a parent orientation session when one of my kids was entering college. A man got up and gave the speech about allowing your adult sons and daughters to navigate their own way, this is a learning experience, they should advocate for themselves and so on. No one can disagree with that. Then he said he'd seen two generations of freshman classes come through, and this was the first time they had to create a "parent liaison" office to deal with parents who helicopter and want to do their kids stuff for them.

So a dad in the audience said maybe it's because colleges have stopped being reasonable, and students are sometimes unable to get results with their reasonable requests, and so parents have more and more had to use their stronger voices of authority to right wrongs. You could have heard a pin drop. Because yeah. If reasonable student requests were respected, parents (who usually don't want to get involved, frankly) wouldn't have to step in.

I stepped in a couple times, interestingly, for computer glitches that happened and the university acknowledged my son's schedule was dumped accidentally, and another son was removed from the choice dorm and placed in the worst dorm (oops, sorry, we see he did register and pay the deposit on the first day the registration opened, and through a computer glitch he and the other first 20 students to register were also dumped. We can try to work him in after school starts. Um no, actually, that's not going to work).

So yeah. After my kids tried and hit closed doors advocating for themselves, I did it. Because I was listened to.

"Well, it sounds like you won't be able to resolve this issue. Please transfer me to someone who can". Done.

Had the universities in these cases treated my kids like the adults they were, I wouldn't have had to step up and demand they be treated fairly.

This. My kid had a late class last year, and the only place open to get food at his SLAC afterward was a fast food type grill. After the 3rd time he was served a chicken sandwich with partially raw chicken (which he only realized after getting home and the place was closed), he complained to the folks working at the grill, then to the food service vendor manager, then to the university person responsible for the vendor relationship. His complaints (and the photos of the raw chicken) were ignored. Another kid who was served raw chicken chose instead to forward a photo to his mom, who posted it to the parent Facebook group with an angry message. Suddenly, the issue was a priority, and the issue was resolved.

This year, when my kid tried to register for classes, literally every class in his major and every class that would fulfill any kind of requirement was full. My kid reached out to his adviser and to multiple profs, and they didn’t even answer his emails. I reluctantly called the dean of academic advising — not to complain but to ask if my kid was doing something wrong in how he was registering. I immediately got a very apologetic call in which the dean said “yeah, we collectively really screwed up here, I’ll fix the issue.”

These experiences teach kids that their best recourse is to ask parents for help, which is not how it should be. I really don’t understand how a university expects kids to advocate for themselves if their policy is to ignore student emails and calls but then to drop everything to respond to parents.

[Anonymous]

The only intervention here is to tell your child to utilize Rate My Professor before registration and to drop before the census date if they don’t like the professor.

The professor can’t talk to you. You’re just going to embarrass everyone involved and give the Professor a good dinner party story.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So I was at a parent orientation session when one of my kids was entering college. A man got up and gave the speech about allowing your adult sons and daughters to navigate their own way, this is a learning experience, they should advocate for themselves and so on. No one can disagree with that. Then he said he'd seen two generations of freshman classes come through, and this was the first time they had to create a "parent liaison" office to deal with parents who helicopter and want to do their kids stuff for them.

So a dad in the audience said maybe it's because colleges have stopped being reasonable, and students are sometimes unable to get results with their reasonable requests, and so parents have more and more had to use their stronger voices of authority to right wrongs. You could have heard a pin drop. Because yeah. If reasonable student requests were respected, parents (who usually don't want to get involved, frankly) wouldn't have to step in.

I stepped in a couple times, interestingly, for computer glitches that happened and the university acknowledged my son's schedule was dumped accidentally, and another son was removed from the choice dorm and placed in the worst dorm (oops, sorry, we see he did register and pay the deposit on the first day the registration opened, and through a computer glitch he and the other first 20 students to register were also dumped. We can try to work him in after school starts. Um no, actually, that's not going to work).

So yeah. After my kids tried and hit closed doors advocating for themselves, I did it. Because I was listened to.

"Well, it sounds like you won't be able to resolve this issue. Please transfer me to someone who can". Done.

Had the universities in these cases treated my kids like the adults they were, I wouldn't have had to step up and demand they be treated fairly.

This. My kid had a late class last year, and the only place open to get food at his SLAC afterward was a fast food type grill. After the 3rd time he was served a chicken sandwich with partially raw chicken (which he only realized after getting home and the place was closed), he complained to the folks working at the grill, then to the food service vendor manager, then to the university person responsible for the vendor relationship. His complaints (and the photos of the raw chicken) were ignored. Another kid who was served raw chicken chose instead to forward a photo to his mom, who posted it to the parent Facebook group with an angry message. Suddenly, the issue was a priority, and the issue was resolved.

This year, when my kid tried to register for classes, literally every class in his major and every class that would fulfill any kind of requirement was full. My kid reached out to his adviser and to multiple profs, and they didn’t even answer his emails. I reluctantly called the dean of academic advising — not to complain but to ask if my kid was doing something wrong in how he was registering. I immediately got a very apologetic call in which the dean said “yeah, we collectively really screwed up here, I’ll fix the issue.”

These experiences teach kids that their best recourse is to ask parents for help, which is not how it should be. I really don’t understand how a university expects kids to advocate for themselves if their policy is to ignore student emails and calls but then to drop everything to respond to parents.

Please note though that none of these examples relate to contacting a professor, which was what was mentioned in the original post.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Academically? Never.

The place for parents to intervene is if there are concerns about their child's mental or physical health.

+1
OP is this a joke?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One bad professor out of many good ones isn't worth worrying about. If they're all bad you're in the wrong college.

Or you've been taught to believe nothing is ever your fault.

[Anonymous]

Even if the hypothetical arbitrary and capricious professor did exist, what makes you think a parent calling them would improve the situation at all? Usually if you call out someone like that, they'll just become even more irrational and retaliatory toward the individual student.