Reply to When should parents intervene in college?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "When should parents intervene in college? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics