Surviving the Workday

You may recall Helicopter Parents Negotiate Salaries, and my request for actual data about the helicopter parents. For the uninitiated in Baby Boomer lingo, Helicopter Parents are those that hover around their children making sure that life is easier (I suppose) by removing road blocks to their success. It’s not that this is a bad thing per se. It’s that helicopter parents seem to get a bit carried away. And it’s not that I doubted this phenomenon existed; it’s that I had yet to see data among the half dozen trend pieces that I’d read.

Well, here is some related data from JC in A Little Hovering is Just Fine:

According to the survey released last week by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, a large majority of nearly 300,000 college freshmen reported that they were happy with their parents’ involvement in their college careers.

More than three-quarters said their parents were involved the right amount in their dealings with college officials. About 73% said they were fine with the role their parents played in choosing their classes.

So at least we can say that most students are all right with their parents involvement (whatever that may be). That doesn’t mean parents are all right with it. Or administrators.

And note that Latino students and first-generation students want much more involvement from their parents:

The study also found that students of color thought their parents were not involved enough in some aspects of college life. Some 43% of Latino students, for example, wanted more parental involvement in choosing their college courses, compared with 18% of white students.

College administrators suggested that the lower level of parental involvement has a lot to do with the fact that students of color are more likely to be the first in their families to attend college.

Read A Little Hovering is Fine, students say for a digest or the actual survey results for a more complete look.

This entry was posted by Ms. Theologian on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under news You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.