Though the college admission profession and process has focused primarily on students-after all, it is the students who go to college, the students who need guidance through the tough decisions and planning of their futures-one piece of the college admission puzzle often gets lost in the shuffle: parents.
As the admission process becomes more competitive, more talked about, and more expensive, parents have become more involved. And, like their sons and daughters, they, too, need more information in order to make (or, rather, help their students make) more informed decisions.
About College Parents of America
Not quite a decade old, College Parents of America (CPA) strives to do just that-advocating on behalf of college parents and serving as a resource for parents as they put their children through college. In fact, CPA is the only national membership association dedicated to these goals.
"We respect the work that [guidance counselors] are doing," College Parents of America President Jim Boyle said. "At the high school level, due to an increasing number of students going to college, more expectations from parents, and budget cuts, counselors are expected to serve greater numbers of students with fewer resources. We're trying to supplement what counselors are doing by providing more resources for current and future college parents."
According to CPA, throughout the U.S., there are more than 35 million households with parents of current and future college students.
From the time parents begin saving and preparing for their children to go to college-all the way through their graduation-CPA provides new and valuable information on:
- savings strategies, financial aid, tax credits/deductions and other ways to help pay for college;
- the academic preparation necessary to get into college;
- the application and selection process; and
- the individual challenges and opportunities parents (and their children) may encounter during the college years.
CPA also strives to be college parents' voice on Capitol Hill, working to ensure that parents are informed about and included in legislative and regulatory debates impacting higher education.
Colleges Respond to Parents
While CPA works to connect parents with colleges and universities, many schools are already responding to this need for better communication with parents, setting up parent relations offices and programs. West Virginia University, for example, has a parent advocate on staff, who fields up to 4,000 calls a year to the school's Parents Club Helpline. At Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, many parents have signed up for a second-year program that encourages them to read and learn, via the Internet, about many of the same books their children are studying in the first-year core curriculum.
"With the cost of education as it is, smart schools are realizing that when parents are spending up to $40,000 a year on their children's college education, it's natural to want to know what's being done with that investment," Boyle said.
Boyle described this new parent-relations-office trend at colleges and universities as "moving the PTA to the college level." He explained that CPA is tapping into this trend as well as encouraging it.
"We're talking every week with schools that are interested in setting up these kinds of programs," he said. "They are widespread and will become more commonplace in the future."
Parents Have a Right to Be Involved
Boyle defends parental involvement in the college admission process and stresses that the goal of his organization is to make resources more readily available to parents-as this will, in turn, remove some of the pressure on admission professionals to provide this information themselves.
"Over-involvement [on behalf of parents] is better than the other alternative, which is no involvement at all," Boyle said. "Studies have been done that show that students perform better in schools when their families are more involved. We're trying to take into account the psychology of Baby Boomer parents, which is to say they are more involved. We hope to help manage their involvement and prevent hyper-involvement. For example, much of parent involvement comes from the questions they ask. But if there are Web sites or listservs for college parents, then there's an outlet for them to express their views and get their questions answered on their own."
For more information about CPA, visit their Web site.
Written by Julie Bogart.
Published January/February 2004.