Big Mother is watching you

'Helicopter parents' are hovering over students and gunning for academics, warn Stephen Phillips and Michael North

There was a time when university was about young people moving away from home and cutting the apron strings - or so their mums and dads hoped; when parents who lingered on campus on the first day of the first term spelt social death for their loved ones. Not any more. On both sides of the Atlantic, parents are demanding more involvement in their offspring's progress through university - and they are making their presence felt.

The situation in the US is, as ever, more extreme. Parents have become so demanding about everything from the colour of their child's room to exam grades that administrators have been forced to respond with special liaison officers and programmes to keep mum and dad in the loop about their child's life on campus. There is even a national parent advocacy group, College Parents of America, that lobbies law-makers.

UK universities do not have such developed structures - the obstinate cry from some institutions is that students are adults and should be treated as such - but there are already family days and welcome parties to ease the parting of parent from child. And some academics fear there is more to come.

Scott Chesney, assistant vice-president for student and academic services at the University of New Hampshire, in the US, has much experience of "helicopter parents" - those who hover around campuses.

He recounts an incident last September when the parents of a fresher camped in the student's room for the first two weeks of term. "They had taken a hotel room, but were basically living in the dormitory with the kid while he was awake - literally putting him to bed - and didn't see anything wrong with that."

Karen Levin Coburn, assistant vice-chancellor for students and associate dean for freshman transition at Washington University in St Louis, recalls a student arriving on campus with mother and interior designer in tow to decorate her room.

Every US student intake has its complement of parents who have problems letting go or overbearing "stage parents", barking instructions from the wings. But there's something different about today's parents and their charges, Chesney says. "They're so invasive, they don't even ponder the notion that something is inappropriate." He says that many US parents think nothing of aggressively interceding on students' behalf over roommate squabbles and even academic affairs. "The big question is, do we deal with this reality and embrace parents as partners, or do we try to fight it and help students become more independent?" Chesney says.

US administrators acknowledge that they face new rules of engagement.

"We've come to realise this is the way it's going to be," says Gwendolyn Dungy, executive president of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, which issues members with a manual on how to handle parents.

Dungy is hard-pressed to think of a US campus without a parent programme.

Parents receive reams of literature about campus affairs, invitations to receptions with the university president and generous but controlled access to academic staff, and there are teams of officials to address their concerns.

Officials want to educate parents about the right channels through which to raise concerns. They hope such initiatives will promote healthy involvement that doesn't cross the line into cramping students' development and that prevents parents from making a nuisance of themselves.

"Universities are recognising that parents will be involved, whether they're welcomed or not," Coburn says, "so they might as well make them understand how university works, so it can be a constructive relationship rather than an adversarial one."

UK universities are waking up to the same reality - what Alex Callinicos, professor of politics at York University, describes as a "quantum leap in parents' interests in their children's prospects at university that starts at admissions visits". A number of institutions now run open days at which parents are given talks about fees, finance and facilities. Leeds University runs pre and post-university application days; a dedicated team at Goldsmiths, University of London runs "showcase days" for students and parents; and Bradford University produces a Parents' Guide , which contains information on everything from accommodation to religious needs.

Mike Nicholson, head of undergraduate admissions at Essex University, says that initiatives that involve parents in their children's university lives are now UK-wide. "We have noticed that since 1998 and tuition fees there has been a much greater interest at the point of application from parents," he says.

The programmes run by Essex have a different emphasis from those in the US, however. Nicholson and his team run outreach days in schools to try to prepare children and their parents for university life before they reach campus - chatting to school pupils, for example, about the need to learn to do their own cooking and laundry.

He doubts whether the UK will go as far as the US. "That would be a retrograde step. Higher education is about a managed transition to adulthood and making responsible citizens. It is a natural break point in family relationships, when parents can get on with their own lives without holding their children's hands for another three to four years."

This ethos is echoed in UK universities that appear to keep parental involvement to a minimum. Typically they cite the Data Protection Act, which prevents them from sharing information about students with their parents. A spokesman for Bristol University says: "We regard our students as independent adults. We are not in loco parentis , and we respect students' right to privacy. We fully understand the parents' wish to be kept in the picture, but it is the students' role to liaise with home." A Glasgow University spokesman stresses: "We consider all those over 18 as adult enough to be in charge of their own education."

This is an attitude that Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, regards as "a bit disingenuous" because it fails to recognise a distinct cultural shift in parenting. "The most important phenomenon is the abandonment of the idea that universities should have a confidential relationship with students," he says. "When I started teaching, none of us talked to parents about their children's grades. Now, increasingly, parents are accompanying their children if there are problems to plead their case, or calling up to say 'Why did Johnny get 45 instead of 55?'"

Furedi is researching the "growing infantilisation of education" - the tendency "to treat 18-year-olds as girls and boys" - and says this will lead to US-style parent services and parent representative forums or councils.

There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence of demanding British mums and dads. An academic at a prestigious Scottish institution says he recently spent a Sunday writing to a parent who complained about the number of tutor contact hours that her daughter was receiving. "There is more awareness of people sitting on their patios in the south of England wondering where the pounds and pence are going," says the academic, who wishes to remain anonymous. In the US, it has been observed that the educated "baby-boomer" generation is less afraid of challenging university authority.

The Scottish academic says that parents and students have no concept of the demands placed on today's academics: "University life has changed dramatically in terms of structure and pressures on academics. The emphasis (in top universities) is entirely on research, which brings in the money.

Teaching is sidelined."

The parent who wrote to the academic comments: "It's ironic that my daughter only gets three hours of teaching periods at a world-renowned university. It's a shame universities don't offer what we expect."

Joe Donovan, a registrar from Watford, is another dissatisfied parent. He thinks universities failed to adequately support his two children, who both dropped out. He says: "Parents need to be involved in university life so they can offer advice and support." He adds that "the idea that you went to university and were made for life is no longer with us" and parents are increasingly looking for a return on their investment in a child's education.

Bristol's spokesman does not believe that fees will encourage parents to demand more involvement: "Is it not possible that the abolition of upfront fees will mean that under the new set-up, parents will feel less rather than more inclined to communicate direct with universities?" But Nicholson concedes that although parents may no longer feel responsible for fees, most will plan to help their children financially after university - with mortgages, for example. The US experience shows that those who hold the purse strings - parents - are key to attracting and retaining students.

Parent programmes can even sway enrolment decisions, notes Dungy, recounting a conversation with a parent who told her that in a toss-up between two campuses for her daughter, they plumped for the one that was more accommodating to parents. Dungy says: "I tell campuses, if you want to get good students, you have to pay attention to parents."