What’s a Parent To Do?
November 29, 2015We’re all painfully familiar with the challenges of navigating today’s economic environment. And we’re also well-versed in the character of the Millennial generation and their engaged, helicopter parents. Taken together, we have to wonder how parents—who want only the best for their children—will approach financing college attendance in the next few years.
Will anything change in how students and parents make college choices? Will families pay even more attention to sticker prices associated with attending college? Will parents more assertively dictate distance from home or even community college attendance? What will families expect from financial aid officers?
Not content with idle speculation, my RHB/The Agency colleagues and I conducted conversations with several parents of current high school juniors and seniors. There was no doubt in these parents’ minds that their sons and daughters would be attractive candidates for many schools and, as a result, that they would all be worthy of significant scholarship support from public and private colleges they might attend.
These conversations—taken together with our own reading and experiences—led us to several observations:
Parents understand college attendance as an important investment in their children—an investment that they hope to share with their sons and daughters. Through my years as an enrollment officer and my own experience as a parent and a counselor to friends and family facing college, it has always been clear that parents of all income brackets see college as an important educational, developmental and life experience for their children. Whether they are able to pay out of pocket, have saved since birth or accept debt, parents have generally seen paying for college as a partnership matched by aid from a variety of sources, and earnings or loans assumed by their students. None of that has changed in the current economy; what has changed is that parent contributions are simply not what they were. The amount of money saved is not as great as parents hoped it would be. Home equity that once provided a strong financing option is now at risk. Job losses—real or feared—result in fears of financial commitment. So what is a well-intentioned parent to do?
Parents feel very much alone in navigating the financing of their children’s college education. Absent the confidence that parents felt in more prosperous years, it becomes apparent that schools—both high schools and colleges—are doing a poor job of educating parents about financial aid and scholarship opportunities. Resourceful financial aid officers—if they exist at all—are attached to specific campuses. Putting professionals who know the ins and outs of financial aid in high schools would help a great deal. Or, as a parent of a current high school junior told us: “If a college would just tell me what I could expect in aid, my son would enroll there today.”
Efforts to include parents in a recruitment communications flow may need to happen earlier and be more specific. While colleges and universities have been reaching out to high school freshman, sophomores and even to middle-schoolers in hopes of garnering early loyalty, most of these children are not yet prepared to seriously think about life after high school. However, communications to parents in the junior or senior year are often the first effort to engage these important influencers in thinking about how institutions truly differ from one another and how families can navigate the increasing costs of attendance—and it’s often too late for parents to prepare. Parents welcome early communications that support them in planning for college and helping their sons and daughters thoughtfully prepare.
Although parents are very interested in information about financial aid and scholarships, mass media advertising of scholarship programs does not make sense to them. How could everyone reading that newspaper be qualified for that scholarship program? Such offers need to be announced through direct and personalized marketing. “You will qualify for a scholarship at our university.”
At the same time, parents seem open to encouraging consideration of institutions they had not heard of before, if that college or university were to offer their child a scholarship or other grant aid. As much as we might abhor the idea that our truly wonderful college may be selected largely on the basis of cost, that may be our current reality. While families may be willing to overlook sticker prices, they simply will not take assurances on faith that their child’s college of choice will be affordable.
Reminiscent of tough economic time in the past, parents will be most active in pushing their children to be realistic and practical about their choice of college and, more significantly, of college major. Colleges need to talk even more about return on investment. Liberal arts colleges may be big losers in this economy unless they can offer placement data that supports liberal arts as a route to jobs in the current economic environment. (Never mind that no one knows what that “current environment” will be when they graduate.) Several of the parents we spoke with were most clear when it came to the subject of college major: “My daughter is interested in history, but there’s no way that she’s going to major in history in college—she’d better study something that’s going to prepare her for a job.”
So what are parents, who only want the best for their children but face an ambiguous economic future themselves, to do? How do they balance the certain desire to invest in their children with the uncertainty of job insecurity, declining home value and diminished savings? Facing similar dilemmas fueled by decreasing endowment values, tightening budgets and uncertain support from donors and public funders, how can colleges and universities best help families?
The opportunities seem to lie where they’ve always been: As never before, institutions must be true to themselves, presenting a clear and coherent picture of how attendance there will contribute to a student’s personal and professional preparation. Most importantly, they must be transparent as early and as thoroughly as possible about what the true costs of attendance are and how families can manage their share of those costs.
The keys:
- Presenting the value of attending your institution as a distinctive choice, to discourage the thinking that all colleges or universities are pretty much the same and to make the case that decisions based primarily on costs come with their own costs.
- Clearly and openly communicating the outcomes and return on investment that result from attending your institution.
- Supporting parents with timely and personalized support regarding ways they can manage the costs of attendance.
- Working with parents in a respectful way to demonstrate that the institution, student and family are indeed partners in financing the costs of higher education.