The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up
Are cellphones, Facebook and e-mail morphing into the campus equivalents of baby monitors? And are these digital tethers healthy for college students and their parents?
That’s the question posed by The iConnected Parent, a thoughtful and accessible guide that examines a new reality in which going off to college no longer means a weekly phone call home on Sunday night. Thanks to technology, many parents and children are in constant, daily communication. (The authors, Middlebury professor Barbara Hofer and journalist Abigail Sullivan Moore, provide compelling statistics to back up their point.)
They also offer sensible guidelines about how to navigate this unprecedented access to your child’s life in college. They point out why certain behaviors — providing a last-minute edit on a term paper, intervening with a dean because your child says her roommate is mean — can damage your college kid’s ability to solve problems without you, a key element in becoming an adult.
Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It
Don’t read this book the night before you drive the little darling to that pricey private college, because you might cancel the trip.
Queens College sociology professor Andrew Hacker, author of the best-selling Two Nations, and New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus take no prisoners in their blistering attack on American colleges and universities, particularly the Ivy League.
They compare the $420 billion per year higher education business to American health care, saying it’s a bloated bureaucracy that costs an astronomical amount of money yet fails to achieve its core mission: teaching undergraduates to think, to question, to be inspired.
Their claim: This failure is going on at the nation’s 4,352 colleges and universities, from the biggest sports powerhouse to the most elite private enclave. Money doesn’t solve the problem. The authors argue provocatively that Ivy League students are among the least well-served in terms of teaching, despite parents writing those $37,000 tuition checks.
Star professors have never had much interest in teaching undergrads, leaving it to overworked, underpaid grad students. But with that price tag? Ouch.
The authors propose dramatic solutions: abolish tenure, stop paid sabbaticals, spin off medical schools. Most of all, they want parents, students, politicians, professors and taxpayers to ask themselves, what is the purpose of college? A real education isn’t about job training or establishing a “Best and the Brightest” elite.
Because Higher Education? wrestles with all sorts of big-picture, philosophical questions, it’s a thought-provoking book. Perhaps a touch too intense for parents writing tuition checks.
Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents
At age 21, Zac Bissonnette, an AOL finance blogger and University of Massachusetts senior, delivers a real mule kick to the higher educational status quo with his impassioned Debt-Free U. In an admiring foreword, Andrew Tobias gets it right when he says the author is “Doogie Howser meets the boys from Facebook.”
Mincing no words, Bissonnette argues that students and their parents must stop taking out loans to pay for college. In 2006-2007, he points out, the average student graduated owing almost $23,000 (with some owing as much as $120,000), while strapped parents took out home-equity loans. This debt will hurt parents approaching retirement and handicap kids entering adulthood.
The author writes out of his own experience of growing up with financially improvident parents. (His father’s house is in foreclosure, and his mother lives with her mother.)
His advice is old school. Consider community college. Live at home. Save money. Get a part-time job.
And parents who want to help? Get a second job.
The Happiest Kid on Campus: A Parent’s Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for You and Your Child) By Harlan Cohen Sourcebooks, 618 pp., $14.99, paperback original
Taking a cue from the ever-popular What to Expect When You’re Expecting series, Harlan Cohen uses a similar perky approach in his user-friendly The Happiest Kid on Campus. The funny part, despite the “happiest kid” title, is Cohen gently reminding parents and kids that most college students probably won’t be happy at first. Most freshmen are painfully homesick their first semester, and often longer. Not to mention anxious, stressed-out, confused and lonely.
But he has a lot of sensible ways to get to happy, if not happiest.
Cohen, author of The Naked Roommate, offers advice on how parents should handle move-in day (remember, it’s the kid’s room, not yours), how much digital communication is too much (the roommate she-devil of yesterday’s text might be the BFF of tomorrow, so don’t intervene), and warns against contacting professors about a failed quiz.
Some of his tips are stunningly sensible. If your child is shy, encourage him to get a job in the cafeteria or library so he has to leave his room and talk to people. The funniest advice? Mom, no cougar-ing, and Dad, quit leering.
Books offer updated advice on navigating college
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