The Millennials Go To College
When Gage Paine went to college in 1975, she kept in touch with her mother through weekly phone calls. “My mom worked for a major corporation and she had a WATS line, so she could call me and it wouldn’t cost anything,” Paine says. “She would always call me at 8:30 on Saturday morning—my roommate hated her—because she went in the office on Saturday morning when it was quiet and she could call for free.”
Today’s college students might not even know what a WATS line is (short for wide area telephone service; a fixed-rate long distance service for commercial users), but they’d be lost without cell phones, e-mail and text messaging. Paine, who joined UTSA in 2007 as vice president for student affairs, laughs when she talks about seeing students on their cell phones between classes. “There’s a different mindset about picking up the phone now,” she says. “It was a once-a-week phone call then because it cost a lot to call long distance.”
While technology has changed the way we communicate with each other, it’s just a part of a bigger picture of how this generation of college students—often called the Millennials or the Echo Boomers—relates to the world and to their parents.
But it is the parents who’ve gotten the bad rap. They’ve been dubbed “helicopter parents” by the media, a term attributed to university administrators weary of parents who “hover” over their children throughout the college search and admissions process and beyond. And while Paine and other administrators say UTSA does see its share of helicopter parents, she believes overly involved parents are an exception. What is happening as a rule, she says, is that parents simply do tend to be more involved in their children’s lives and education—from kindergarten through college—than they were a generation ago.
“There certainly is way more conversation and information exchange between students today and their parents,” Paine says. “Some of that’s the technological capability, and some of that is the predisposition to be a part of each other’s lives.”
Paine has been particularly intrigued by one idea she’s heard to explain the changing times: that the generation gap that existed between parents and children is disappearing. “Students are mostly quite happy for parents to be connected and to know about their daily lives in a way that was very different 20 years ago,” she says.
That may be particularly true when it comes to making decisions about college. In a 2007 national survey of more than 1,700 high school seniors conducted by the College Board and Art & Science Group, 95 percent of participants reported that their parents were either “very involved” or “involved” in their college plans. And of the surveyed students, 60 percent said they were satisfied with their parents’ involvement, and 28 percent actually wished their parents were more involved. Only 6 percent said they wanted their parents to be “less involved.”
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— Rebecca Luther
Illustrations by Robert Neubecker