Colleges Are Learning to Hold Parents' Hands

In her campus job, she sometimes gets calls about offbeat problems, like the time a student accidentally dropped a cellphone down an elevator shaft. Her phone also rings with questions about balky Internet service, roommate tensions in the residence halls and difficulties in finding tutors.

But it isn't frazzled freshmen or other antsy undergraduates who keep DuBord busy with those inquiries. It's their parents.

DuBord is one of an emerging breed of American college officials who tends to moms and dads. As San Diego State's coordinator of parent programs, DuBord handles a telephone hotline and e-mail service just for parents, including many who are eager to help their children deal with the hassles of campus life. Among other things, she also organizes parent orientations, meets with the parent advisory board and helps hit up parents for donations.

It's a job that, a generation ago, wasn't on the radar screen. The rise of parent relations specialists in recent years is, in part, an acknowledgment that baby boomers often want to keep running interference for sons and daughters old enough to vote and serve in the military.

College administrators say the kinds of parents who took time to attend their children's school plays and soccer games and helped with their college applications aren't inclined to fade into the background during the kids' college years.

That's true, many administrators say, even for baby boomers who prized their own independence when they went off to college.

Today's parents "are sort of like their kids' managers," said Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, executive director of the National Assn. of Student Personnel Administrators, an organization of college officials. Dungy said that even though many schools offer "letting go" talks at parent orientations, most baby boomers don't fully take the message to heart.

"It's unrealistic for us to say 'let go' when they drop their kids off at college. They're not going to do it," she said.

These days, nine out of 10 four-year campuses offer special orientations for parents. And about 70% of four-year schools have at least one staffer working full-time or nearly full-time with parents, according to a survey of 607 U.S. schools by the nonprofit advocacy group College Parents of America.