Teaching College Kids To Pilot Their Own Helicopter

The issue of how deeply involved parents of college students should be in their child’s campus life is a hot topic in higher education these days. As the fall term was beginning, media accounts highlighted efforts at some schools intended to push parents to drop their children off on campus and depart quickly and quietly. Now a recent survey of college admissions officers indicates that so-called helicopter parenting is on the rise.

As a college president and a parent, I find that approach—encouraging parents to do a drive-by, drop-off—an unrealistic approach to coping with moms and dads who seem to hover over their college student.

While too much parental involvement can be a problem, colleges and universities must acknowledge that parents have a crucial role to play in helping their child succeed.

Parents spend years preparing their child for college, and working to find ways to pay for their education. Those are major accomplishments. And taking your son or daughter to college for the first time is often emotionally wrenching. Parents deserve more than cursory thanks and a nod toward the door.

Instead, colleges need to communicate clearly how a healthy relationship between parents, students and the institution should work. We also need to explain that making that relationship work will enhance their child’s chances for success at college and in life.

Balance is the key. Parents should support their child, but not serve as their gofer or administrative assistant. They can do this by urging their son or daughter to learn how to navigate the college bureaucracy and campus life on their own. This is a vital part of the educational process. It includes allowing the student to handle issues relating to classes, housing, dining, roommates, and extracurricular activities such as athletics, clubs, and student organizations.

A good body of research indicates that college students have a better chance of succeeding academically and socially when they themselves discover and initiate contact with the campus offices and departments that offer services and resources for students.

We also know that the problem-solving skills students develop during the formative years at college are an important part of their education. Parents should encourage students to take responsibility for their own financial planning, for managing their time, and for setting limits on their personal behavior.

They can also explain to their child that college is more competitive than high school. Coping with the more intense atmosphere can be a major transition for new students who often have little experience with not getting their way. On campus, the student may encounter setbacks, such as not getting into a course because is it is full or not getting playing time on a sports team.

Learning to deal with this stepped-up level of competition is healthy for students. That may mean making sure to sign up for a class as soon as possible or meeting with the professor to see if an exception can be made. Or it could mean talking to the coach about what needs to be done to earn playing time.

It is essential that parents advise their son or daughter to make use of the student support resources most colleges and universities provide. Most colleges have advisers and administrators dedicated to helping students acclimate to college life and overcome setbacks or obstacles. There are many sources of advice and counsel that parents can suggest their child contact. These include the dean of students, professors, religious leaders, older students, including residence hall staffers, as well as campus offices that provide academic services such as tutoring, coaching on time management and study strategies.

Some students will need more assistance than others. Parents can help provide support for students with special needs by encouraging their son or daughter to go talk to the coordinator of disability services or the staff at the multicultural resource center or counseling service. Helping students learn how to communicate about issues they are facing and how to seek out assistance when necessary is a job that parents, as well as college faculty and staff should share.

Leaving home and starting college has always been an emotional experience for students and their parents. Helicopter parenting may be on the rise, but it is not new.

Through the years, some parents have stuck around campus trying to help their child adjust. But one of the most important things parents can do to help their college student make a successful adjustment is to strike a balance between direct intervention and letting their son or daughter learn to pilot their own helicopter.
By Marvin Krislov, Oberlin College President

Adding Personality to the College Admissions Mix

Wall Street Journal
August 19, 2009
For years, colleges have asked applicants for their grade-point averages and standardized test scores.
Now, schools like Boston College, DePaul University and Tufts University also want to measure prospective students' personalities.
Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity. Colleges say such assessments are boosting the admissions chances for some students who might not have qualified based solely on grades and traditional test scores. The noncognitive assessments also are being used to screen out students believed to be at a higher risk of dropping out, and to identify newly admitted students who might need extra tutoring.
Big nonprofits that administer standardized admissions tests, including the College Board, the Educational Testing Service and ACT Inc., are also getting in on the trend. ETS, for instance, which administers the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, recently unveiled a "personal potential index" designed for schools that want to replace traditional letters of recommendation for prospective grad students with a standardized rating.
"There is quite a bit of demand for these [noncognitive] instruments," says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling. Educators say the use of such assessments is likely to grow as some schools search for new tools to recruit more minority and low-income students. At the same time, budget pressures are forcing public institutions in states like California and Florida to find new tools for selecting incoming students.
Critics contend that efforts to quantify noncognitive traits are often unreliable. And, they say, as the new systems of evaluation become widespread, prospective students will figure out how to game the answers to their advantage. Some legal advocates also say the assessments could stir affirmative-action controversy if they are used solely to give a boost to minorities' admissions chances.
Many colleges have asked personality-related questions for years as part of the admissions process, but the results were seldom scored in a standardized, numerical way, says William Sedlacek, a retired University of Maryland education professor whose "noncognitive questionnaire" has been used by various colleges and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to award scholarships. He says such assessments are reliable and that if students and counselors figure out how to manipulate them they will have to be revised. "Right now, these things are useful," Dr. Sedlacek says.
Boston's Torch Scolars
Boston's Northeastern University uses noncognitive assessment for its Torch Scholars Program, which is designed to identify applicants who show leadership potential or have overcome adversity but probably wouldn't qualify for the university based solely on their high-school grades and test scores.
Torch scholars have average SAT scores about 200 points below the typical Northeastern student, says Philomena Mantella, senior vice president of enrollment management. Still, about 90% of them stay on from their freshman to sophomore years, roughly akin to the university-wide average of 92%. Nationwide, the so-called persistence rate for freshman at four-year schools is just under 70%.
Simona Vareikaite, 20, a Northeastern junior majoring in criminal justice, said her high-school grades were good but she didn't do well on the SAT. Although she found her college's personality assessment to be "weird," it gave her a boost in the competition for the Torch scholarship. "The whole process kind of opened a new opportunity for me," says Ms. Vareikaite, who after immigrating from Lithuania started cleaning offices as an 11-year-old to help support her family.
DePaul University, in Chicago, made one noncognitive assessment part of its application process for the first time for this fall's freshman class. Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president of enrollment management, says it was mainly used to make decisions about students who were just over or just under DePaul's typical admission requirements.
Of the 8,500 freshman expected this year, he estimates about 150 got in because of how they answered four personality-assessment questions. But "lackadaisical responses" resulted in the rejection of about 50 applicants who were being considered for admission. Among the questions, to be answered in about 100 words each: "Describe a goal you have set for yourself and how you plan to accomplish it. How would you compare your educational interests and goals with other students in your high school?"
At Oregon State University, every would-be undergraduate must now provide 100-word answers to six questions that are part of what the school calls its "Insight Resume." One question, designed to measure applicants' capacity to deal with adversity, asks them to describe the most significant challenge they have faced and the steps they took to address it. Another asks them to describe their experiences facing or witnessing discrimination and how they responded. Every answer is reviewed by two admissions officers and scored on a 1-to-3-point scale.
Michele Sandlin, OSU's admissions director, says the university implemented the assessment in 2004 in part to help it attract and keep minority, low-income and other applicants who don't quite have the grades and test scores OSU generally looks for. Low scores on the Insight Resume aren't used to disqualify students with adequate grades and test scores, she says.
Nonprofits also are developing noncognitive evaluation systems. A "student readiness inventory" created by ACT is being used by Northern Arizona University, Chicago's Wilbur Wright College and more than two dozen other schools to identify admitted students with traits that might make them dropout risks, which could result in their getting extra help. The students are asked to respond to 108 statements and are rated by their level of agreement with items such as "I turn in my assignments on time," and "I'm a patient person."
The "personal potential index" recently unveiled by ETS has been piloted over the past three years in an Arizona State University effort to get more minority students to take the GRE and attend graduate school. Applicants are asked to identify past professors, supervisors and other recommenders. These people are sent a form asking them to rank applicants from "below average" to "truly exceptional" on items such as whether they support the efforts of others or accept feedback without getting defensive.
And the College Board, which administers the SAT, is working with researchers at Michigan State University to develop a questionnaire designed to measure applicants' judgment and behavior by asking them how they would respond to various situations, such as a group research project where one student doesn't contribute. A College Board spokeswoman says the company has not yet decided how the questionnaire would be administered or to whom.
Gaming the System
Not everyone thinks such assessments are a good idea. Relying on applicants' writing about themselves won't always result in reliable information, says Howard Gardner, a Harvard education professor and author who has studied human intelligence. "There is a real danger in [applicants] gaming questions like that," he says.
And legal-advocacy groups that have fought racial preferences in college admissions say the new assessment systems could face court challenges if white and minority students are measured differently. "They can't apply them in a discriminatory fashion or adopt them solely for the purpose of increasing minorities in their classes," says Michael Rosman, general counsel for the Center for Individual Rights. The group represented plaintiffs before the Supreme Court, which in a pair of 2003 decisions upheld the use of minority status to boost the chances of an applicant in college admissions decisions, but ruled against points-based admissions formulas and said applicants should be considered case-by-case.
By ROBERT TOMSHO

For Top Colleges, Economy Has Not Reduced Interest (or Made Getting in Easier)

New York Times
March 30, 2009
The recession appears to have had little impact on the number of applications received by many of the nation’s most competitive colleges, or on an applicant’s overall chances of being admitted to them.
Representatives of Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown, among other highly selective institutions, said in telephone and e-mail exchanges in recent days that applications for the Class of 2013 had jumped sharply when compared to the previous year’s class. As a result, the percentage of applicants who will receive good news from the eight colleges of the Ivy League (and a few other top schools that send out decision letters this week) is expected to hover at – or near – record lows.
Bill Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard since 1986, said that the 29,112 applications Harvard received this year represented an all-time high, and a 6-percentage point increase from last year. He said the percentage of applicants admitted would be 7 percent, down from 8 percent a year ago. Dartmouth said that the 18,130 applications it received was the most in its history, too, and that the 12 percent admitted would be its lowest.
Stanford said that the 30,350 applications it received represented a 20 percent increase, and that while it estimated a 7.5-percent admission rate, which would be its lowest, it declined to specify a final figure until later in the week.
Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Princeton declined to release their final admission rates in advance of sending out most of their decision letters via e-mail at 5 p.m. eastern time on Tuesday. But Brown said it had received 21 percent more applications, overall, compared to a year ago; Yale was up 14 percent; Columbia was up 13 percent and Cornell was up 3 percent. Princeton said that, as of January, it had tallied a 2 percent increase in applications, but anticipated the pool had gotten even larger since then. At the University of Pennsylvania, the number of applications increased by 4 — to 22,939, from 22,935.
However, applications to highly selective colleges were not up universally. Many of the best-known liberal arts colleges had fewer applications this year.
Williams College in western Massachusetts said that applications were down 20 percent this year, with 6,024 having applied to the Class of 2013, as compared to 7,552 a year ago. Williams’s acceptance rate, in turn, is expected to be about 20 percent, which is higher than in recent years. The reason for the change was not immediately clear, though applicants outside New England who are concerned about their finances would have to take into account that Williams is not close to a major city or airport – and thus could be expensive to get in and out of.
Similarly, Middlebury College in Vermont, which is also relatively remote, had a nearly 12 percent drop in applications. Amherst, another Massachusetts college and Williams rival, said that applications were down about 1 percent - and that its admissions rate would increase slightly, to 16 percent, in part because Amherst is aiming to increase its first-year class by about 25 students. (Wesleyan University in Connecticut, which sometimes competes for students with Amherst and Williams, has drawn substantially more interest this year: its applicant pool was 22 percent larger than last year’s; its admission rate fell to 22 percent, from 27 percent.)
Amherst had a nearly 10-percent increase in early-decision applications. It enrolls about 30 percent of its first-year class through that program, and – like most schools surveyed – it said it had not lost a single one to due any change in family finances since the fall, when such applications are made.
“Given the economy, it’s very surprising to me,’’ said Tom Parker, dean of admission and financial aid, “and when I told the board, they found it hard to believe, too.’’
In a sign of how hard it is to draw broad conclusions about an admissions season that has been set against a stark economic backdrop, just over half of the nearly 350 institutions that accept the Common Application, a shared online admission form, received more applications this year than last; just under half received fewer. Bryn Mawr and Wellesley were among those that were up slightly, while overall applications to Grinnell and Pomona were down (as compared to their early applications, which were up quite a bit.)
Among the best-known public universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville all recorded gains in applications – a sign, surely, of some applicants’ desire to stay closer to home, and pay less than they might at an elite private college. Applications to the University of Wisconsin in Madison fell nearly 3 percent.
Of course, applying to college is one thing; being able to afford to go is another.
Harvard, which like many colleges raised its financial aid budget this year, said that between this week and May 1, when applicants’ decisions are due, it was bracing for many to make impassioned appeals of their financial aid offers, whether by phone or e-mail or in person. In response, Mr. Fitzsimmons said that the Harvard financial aid office would be open every day in April, with expanded hours, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
“We’re going to listen,’’ he said. “We don’t have a policy of matching other schools’ awards. But we’re going to listen to what a family thinks its unusual circumstances might be. We learn a lot about our families in April.’’
By:Jacques Steinberg & Tamar Lewin