What Impact Does Helicopter Parenting Have on Student Success?

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Hi everyone. I'm Michael Horn, the chief strategy officer at the Entangled Group in an education technology studio and the co founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. Have written a few books on the future of education as well. And very excited to welcome you to this episode of Future youe where we get to dive into a slightly different topic, one that is actually really important. And I can't believe it's taken us this long to get to even in the short life of this podcast, but about student success and the role of parents on campus. And I'm joined by my colleague Jeff.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. I'm an author of several books on higher education, a contributor at the Washington Post in the Atlantic, and I'm also a special advisor at Arizona State University. And we're here where we're recording today at Arizona state's new Washington D.C. center. And thank you to Arizona State for supporting this podcast, Future youe, about what's next in higher education. We're joined today. Michael I'm really excited about our guest, Laura Hamilton. She's an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, and author of the 2016 book Parenting to a How Family Matters for College Women's Success. I came across Laura's work a couple of weeks ago because I wrote a column in the Washington Post about a study that was part of the basis for this book. And it shows that hovering parents sometimes don't stop once their kids go off to college. We've heard a lot about helicopter parents over the years, and that's particularly true for affluent and upper middle class parents. Such parents really can kind of continue to help their children once they go into college. And Laura and her colleagues followed a group of female students and their parents from 41 families. They all lived on the same floor. The students, I should say, not the families, lived on the same dorm floor at an unnamed prominent Midwest public university. And what they found was that the academic and social experiences of the students on the floor differed greatly and it really was the parents who played the role. So the affluent parents who were called the college concierges kind of used their resources to provide their kids with academic, social and career support, access to university services. And the other group, kind of this outside group, which were really the parents of the middle and working class parents, some of whom didn't go to college themselves, just assume the university would provide the necessary resources for their children. And we're going to be talking to Laura about what happened to those two groups of students over the course of their college careers. So Laura, thanks again for joining us on this episode of Future U.

Happy to be here.

Great. So tell us a little bit more about how you kind of got started in researching higher education. You know, as a professor of sociology, there's a lot of topics in the, in the current public policy arena that you could do. Why higher ed?

Yeah, I actually was interested in sex in college when I first began this research.

It's a much better topic.

I was about to say it. And you ended up with parents. So now I'm really intrigued.

Yeah, yeah. How did I get there? So some of my earlier work looked at sexual assault. It also looked at the party scene on college campuses. And one of the things that really stood out was the class differences in students participation in the party life of a large school with a Greek system, big time college sports. And I found that students from affluent backgrounds were much more likely to engage in this and students from less affluent backgrounds were less likely to engage in this. And so that set me off on being interested in the ways in which social class shapes people's college experiences. So then I kind of left behind sex. My first book, Paying for the Party with my colleague Elizabeth Armstrong, focused on how the organization of campus gives students from social class backgrounds very different experiences. And then after that research which focused on these women, the daughters of the 441 families that form the core of this new book, I got interested in how involved the parents were in the lives of the more affluent students. It seemed to be one of the more important predictors of college student success. So that's how I went from sex to parents.

And so tell us a little bit about what you found. So what were the differences you found between kind of the affluent and upper middle income families and the, the help those parents provided as opposed to everybody else that you followed.

So affluent parents, particularly affluent parents who send their children to a large public flagship school, know that there's a lot of ways for their students to take a misstep and for something to go wrong. So they become involved from the beginning in terms of major selection, making sure that their student opts into a career that is going to make sense when they enter the job market or a field that they can move into graduate school easily with. They provide advice about how to interact with professors. They provide advice about how to manage the challenges of the social scene. Most of these parents understand that being involved in college is typically useful for integration Purposes, research suggests that if you are involved in campus life, then you're more likely to persist. So they encourage their children to get involved. They sometimes provide very direct suggestions about what they should be involved with. It's a constant stream of advice and it's multiple times a day on the cell phone with texts, phone calls all day long, helping their children to not make mistakes, basically mistakes that would cause them to not be able to persist at the university. And of course, they're aided by a lot of different things. They have jobs that are more flexible. These are professors, accountants, lawyers, doctors. As a professor, I can talk to you in the middle of my day. That's a possibility. They have resources, they have money, so they can pay for tutors, they can go visit, they can be there physically when their student seems down. They fly 3,000 miles to be wherever they need to be. And they have a huge knowledge of how college works. And that piece of it is very, very important. A lot of.

Yeah, so that's what I was actually going to ask you about because I kind of remember being a freshman still vaguely in my own memory. And the long distance bill I ran up to my mom in the first month of colle went steadily down from there, I think. But I'm curious, how much has this changed over time? Because the portrait you depict is just striking of how involved these parents are in their children's education in college. We knew earlier. How much has that changed, though, over the last 30 years?

Yeah, that's a great question. It seems that the level of involvement and the extent of into the life course, like how long parents are involved, has increased dramatically over that time period. There's research, for example, that looks at parental spending on children. And it used to be that, you know, there was a huge peak at early childhood and then it sort of went down over the life course. Now, if you look at that data, there's a huge peak when they're early and then you hit 18 and there's a ton of money and that's college. Right. So. So part of what's changed is the price of college. So parents are more involved because they're investing a lot of their own money, often if they have it, into college. Part of what's changed is the digital technology. So you mentioned the long distance bill with the cell phone you don't have

because you don't have that anymore. Fair enough. Okay.

Yeah, so that's part of it. And the other thing that's happened too is that upper middle class and upper class parents have increasingly become Anxious about their children's ability to reproduce their class backgr. That wasn't exactly the case 25, 30 years ago. It felt a little bit more certain. There's been a lot of changes, structural economic changes, such that parents can no longer be certain that their children will have access to a desirable job. There's high rates of unemployment, reduced job security. These are not new circumstances, but they definitely are particularly acute on the heels of the Great Recession and with the rise of college costs and the options available. There's just a lot of ways that things could go wrong. So parental anxieties are up.

So, Laura, when some people listen to this or read about this, they say, oh, those helicopter parents, right. Or these college concierge, right. They should just like, let go a little bit. But part of this is also like, what types of services and resources could you provide or can a university provide to those outsiders? Right. So that they could basically operate at the same level then as the students who are getting all this help for their parents. In other words, what can universities do to play the role that these parents are playing for their children?

Absolutely. I actually get really irritated when people do these sort of individualistic attacks on helicopter parents. I mean, if you read the media, it seems like they're the worst people alive. And I think that part of the problem here is that parent, you know, the actions of parents are definitely contributing to inequality, but we know that parents are going to do that. The issue in my mind is largely the organizations and the ways in which universities sort of have more recently invited involved parents in because of the benefits that universities get from having parents sort of shoulder a lot of this labor. And they've done that in part because funding has dramatically dropped since the 80s for public universities. And they're looking for someone to provide some help to make sure that they can produce successful students and workers.

So I just want to make sure. Sorry, I just want to make sure. I understand that. So, meaning that colleges and universities aren't just asking for the tuition dollars to account for the decline in public support, but that they're also asking for donations, other kinds of support. When you say sort of really interested in the contributions these parents can make, what else do you have in mind behind that?

Yeah, it's not just monetary donations, although monetary donations are huge, particularly from out of state parents who pay two to three times state tuition. But the other kind of work I'm talking about is, for example, counseling. So a lot of these universities have huge academic counseling loads for 500 students per advisor. They can't assume that the students at the university are getting great advice, but if they know they have involved parents, they're getting that outside of the university. It's sort of an outsourcing of.

I was gonna say. So it's an outsourcing, almost reduction of service or cost. That's interesting.

Yeah, same with career services too. Career services is another area where parents play a huge role in securing a job for their youth.

So, Laura, I'm kind of curious about this floor at this Midwest university because obviously these students were kind of mixed together. Right. So you had these students from lower income families as well as higher income families. The higher income students kind of knew how to navigate the university mainly because of their parents. What was the peer interaction? Right, because I'm thinking of a lot of first generation students I've met who went to college and kind of learned how to navigate college from their peers. Was there enough peer interaction that these essentially the parents were telling these upper income students who could then tell the other students on the floor, or was there not as much peer interaction as we would hope?

I think we would hope there would be more peer interaction across lines, but in reality. So on that dormitory floor where I was situated for that first year, there were massive class divides. So the more affluent students were out at the party scene, spending time in their evenings drinking, getting to know each other, whereas students from low income backgrounds were working at the bar, slinging the drinks, or they were working at Walmart or somewhere else around town. So by the end of the year, the lower income students had very, very few connections on their campus. They knew very few people. Most of their ties were people back home or people that were employees at the bowling alley or at Walmart. Whereas the more affluent students had integrated pretty quickly through these social activities and a huge portion of them joined the gre, which on most campuses is incredibly segregated by social class, race and of course gender. And so they would move into that social world and share whatever knowledge they had or help from their parents with students just like them. They weren't connecting with lower income students on their campus.

That's interesting. So Laura, just quickly, because then we're going to go to break one thing. If you kind of ran a university, what one thing would you do to try to again, kind of even the experiences between these upper income students and the lower income students?

That's a great question.

And I wish, I wish there was one thing.

Yeah, and I wish there was one thing. I do think that university administrators are exceptionally well intentioned in most cases. A lot of times the issue is really scarce resources, lack of funding, and an absolute need to remain solvent. So they do the kinds of things that students from affluent backgrounds want and they rely on parental label. But one, I'd say one thing that schools could do is make, for example, some of the more desirable programs at the university. There's a lot of competitive honors programs and a lot of times the more advantaged kids that get into those programs because their parents know what is necessary for it and they are able to track in quickly, whereas students from less privileged backgrounds don't realize the programs are there, don't have the specific classes or specific grades, and by the time they realize it, it's sophomore, junior year. And a lot of those programs don't let students move in that late. So there's small things you can do, for example, opening up those programs to sort of later admissions or providing sort of that information tailored to low income students so they know these opportunities are available and they don't miss some of the better options at their university.

Just fascinating look at the power of social capital, both going into institutions and coming out of it as well. Laura, thank you so much for joining us. And for those listening again, check out her book Parenting to A How Family Matters for College Women's Success. Laura, huge thanks for being on Future youe with us today.

Thanks a lot.

And we'll be back after this break.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. For more information and to apply to our next cohort, go to Georgetown asu. Edu. This episode was also made possible with support from the Entangled group, where innovation meets operations. Entangled is a venture studio focused on helping the education ecosystem transition to support the knowledge economy. We build companies and nonprofits that support higher education institutions as they innovate to carry out their critical missions for society in the 21st century.

I'm Michael Horne. Welcome back to Future youe. Jeff, Just coming off that conversation with Laura Hamilton, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced, and talking about her book Parenting to a Degree, which I recommend people check out. The conversation was striking to me because you had just written the Washington Post column on it as well, which I had read in addition. And so I kind of want to start the question to you that you ended Laura with, which is, if you're a college president or someone in a college focused on student success and balancing sort of the effects of helicopter parents being virtually and physically actually on campus where there are students, in some cases, what would you do?

Yeah. So there's like three things I think that colleges and universities should focus on. One is kind of pre college and the orientation process, the onboarding process for students. You know, we spend so much time and effort on getting into college. And a lot of institutions, especially, especially institutions that have been trying to grow their numbers of low income students, do a lot of outreach on the admissions piece of this. But then once admissions is over and they're admitted and enrolled, a lot of that support structure goes away. So I think there's a lot that colleges and universities can do in those months before college actually starts to talk about how they should navigate the institution. Then once there, I think especially for these big state universities, there has to be scale. So they have a lot of these boutique programs that help low income students, but they're small and in some cases they actually cost money. And so they have to also figure out ways to reduce the cost of those things. So that's the second thing they can do. And then the third thing, and one of the things that I talked to her about at the end there was this idea of peer advising. Right. Peers play a huge role in this. When I did my book on There is Life After College, and I would ask students, how did you know to take that class? How did you know to be mentored by that professor? Or how did you get that internship? It was always, you know, an upperclassman told me.

Right.

It was a peer that told me. Somebody they met in a club, somebody they met on their dorm floor, as in this case. And I think that institutions need to figure out, how do we not have these students self segregate as they seem to be doing, as Laura mentioned they're doing, and how do we get them to mix together a lot more so that that peer advising works? Because that peer advising, first of all is scalable and it's free.

Yeah. I was struck by, I mean, these families lived on the same floor or these actually not families, I should say students, but some of the families were there, but students from different backgrounds, economically, racially, geographically, same floor, and yet did not have this mixing because of an inequity in how they financed the higher education system. And in effect, students that had to have work, study and be working jobs to pay for the tuition. Just weren't around for those parties, for those conversations, for those late night dorm room nights. Many of us are fond of remembering where you talk about something esoteric and then develop a bond that would lead to that one offhand comment that led to a summer internship and then a job and so forth. It just really points to how important social capital is. My colleague at the Christensen Institute, Julia Freeland Fisher, coming out with a new book this summer called who youo Know. But it's just if you've mixed students in that way physically, and we know physical proximity has a lot to do with this, and yet you still have these jobs and other opportunities pulling people away, you're not getting that mix that you want in terms of those conversations and so forth. So how do you tackle that?

Well, and she didn't talk about this. It's not only success in college, but it's also success after college. And one of the things she didn't get to talk about, but if you read the book, you know, some of these students ended up not graduating. And then those students who did graduate, again, the lower income students, they didn't get very good jobs. Or there's this great two students she talks about in the study that was based on the book where they wanted to go to dental school or they wanted to be dentists. And the upper income student kind of knows what's required in terms of getting into a dental school. And she ends up going there and then the other student doesn't, the lower income student, her parents are not really sure why her grades are failing anyway. She eventually graduates, she can't get into dental school, and she ends up being a dental assistant. Assistant, which is a job that pays like $11 an hour and doesn't even require a college degree. So you even see the impact of this after college. And I think this is critical, Michael, when we're thinking of career services and how do we integrate career services for these students, but also when you're thinking about scale, you know, a big solution to scale around student success at a lot of colleges, universities in recent years has been technology. Right. So how do we, how can we use technology to potentially help in this, in this area?

Yeah, I think something that you said struck me because to your point, we've said before, a lot of colleges frame good as being smaller. And a place like Arizona State frames it the exact opposite way. That scale has its advantages. And I think that's what you're getting at, which is that when you actually serve larger and larger numbers of students, you can use Technology to gather data about some of these interactions both in school as well as services that they consume out of the classes, whether that's advising, mentoring, different clubs, whatever else, to figure out where students may be dropping through the cracks, not aware of something, and then use technology to nudge people, send text messages. Did you know that this club which helps do X is meeting on Wednesdays at this time? Little things like that, just to bring the awareness up. And technology is a great way to very unobtrusively and seamlessly insert that into someone's life without making them go to the career service center where you visit maybe twice as a junior and actually really have it infused your life. And so we're seeing a lot of technology efforts at working with these nudges. I would say it'll work so long as colleges and universities back that up with human beings then on the other end of it able to act on that with some of these, with some of these nudges. And so there's actually someone on the other end. And to answer the question, if you follow up with I didn't quite understand X because technology is still, it's getting better at this, but it's still going to leave questions and so forth. And the question is, how seamless can you make it? I think to both understand the context of the student in a deep way. What are their motivations, why are they here, what are they trying to achieve and not push it so much as help create that pull where they want to pull the solution in their lives to improve their graduation and economic fortune.

Well, and I think there's a lot of hype around technology, but I'm kind of really impressed with something that Georgia State, which gets a lot of press about a lot of things it's doing, but the Chronicle had a piece a couple of weeks ago about chatbot that they're using. They largely started using it around summer melt. So this idea that a lot of students once they enroll in May don't end up showing up in September, a lot of that is low income students who don't have the high school infrastructure anymore to help them through those last couple of months before college. But here a chatbot again can do it at scale, driven by artificial intelligence, much like Siri. So if we think of having that personal digital assistant, and again, a student might have a question they're afraid to ask a roommate who may have that social capital, they don't know where to turn on campus, but they turn on their phone and they say, how do I do X, Y or Z and again, it's not, I agree with you, there has to be a human being kind of following up on that. But some of these questions are pretty basic. And if we use technology in that way, not only to nudge students but also to give them the information that they need in the moment they need it. The moment they need it is the critical thing. I think it could be absolutely critical.

Yeah, I think that's right. And colleges and universities, I think increasingly are going to have to invest in these systems and invest in some of the structures behind them as well because you know, the demographics are changing. They're not going to be serving as many high percentage of students from these well off backgrounds that maybe have these parents that can come in. And as Laura I think aptly said, the college can outsource some of these services to those parents. That's increasingly not going to be the case for huge swaths of the population most colleges and universities are serving. And they're going to have to, if they're interested in student success, success which they're going to have to be for their own viability going forward, they're going to have to integrate backward, I think, into these sorts of services to provide opportunities for students. And it's not going to just be the technology, it's actually going to be meaningful career service opportunities, meaningful exchanges with alumni maybe in the community that can help them get that internship or job, unlock certain pathways that they may not have known about, information about certain courses or mentees and so forth. And I think have to take a page, quite frankly, from what a lot of the online players like Western governors have increasingly found, which is that it's not enough just to have your one faculty advisor who you meet with once a year, twice a year, but really have someone who's following you on a weekly basis, jumping in and diving in. I think the brick and mortar campuses in this nation are going to have to invest in similar functions and technology is clearly going to be the way they do that in a sustainable manner. But they're going to have to create functions.

And that said, I think it's really critical for faculty members here. I mean, faculty play a huge role. We know from the work that Gallup has done with the Gallup Purdue Index that a student who's had a professor who cared about them, told them to follow their dreams and really mentored them in that way. We're not only twice as likely to succeed in the workforce after graduation, but were much happier in their jobs and as well. And what happens at many of these state universities is that particularly first year students get pushed into courses where maybe it's a grad student assistant or it's not a full time faculty member, it might be an adjunct faculty member. In many ways, I think that especially these large universities or other universities that are taking in large numbers of low income and first generation students really need to rethink about that first year of college and have a whole separate system that really helps not only onboard these students, as I was talking earlier about what they can do with orientation, but really helps guide them through those first 12 months. You know, these places are really scary.

Yeah.

There's no one, you know, as Laura told us, they're not, you know, texting and calling their parents. Many of their parents are working during the day anyway and didn't go to college themselves and they didn't go to college themselves and they didn't know it. Right. So I feel like if we could get them through that first year in particular, that then some of these other programs will help kind of push them through to the end. But in many ways I think we need to kind of really rethink the first year of college and maybe even have a whole different structure for the first year of college for some of these students.

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, look, the book that I'm working on right now, choosing College, focuses on the jobs that students are hiring college to do, why they're coming, in essence. And what became clear to us is that there's a whole swath of students under a couple different circumstances that are coming that they're not sure what they want. And so the idea of a guided pathway where we're gonna. You just have to take these courses because this is your first year courses, that's not gonna actually be an adequate solution because they need a little bit of that jumping around, tasting a few things. But that's not gen ed either, as we've traditionally known it. That doesn't mean the big lecture, survey courses in a number of fields, hoping that that gets you an experience. I think it's going to look much more like a combination of a boot camp with Northeastern where you have a co op experience for 90 day sprints with some dedicated courses around that give you a flavor of a particular area, do five or six of those, get some passion and start to build in the networks. And so I think that's really the key, but it's going to be something for us to dive into more Jeff in future episodes. And for all of you listening, a big thank you for joining us this week on Future youe. And thanks to Laura Hamilton again for joining us for this session. My name is Michael Horn. You can follow me on Twitter ichaelbhorn

or on my website@michaelbhorn.com and I'm Jeff Salingo. And you can follow me on Twitter EFF Salingo or on the web@jeffsalingo.com and you could download, subscribe and rate Future youe on itunes and Google Play and follow us on Facebook at Future you podcast. Until next time, thank you very much for listening.