John Bader - Sending Your Millennial to College: A Parents Guide to Supporting College Success

SENDING YOUR MILLENNIAL TO COLLEGE

A Parents Guide to Supporting College Success

A companion to
Deans List: 10 Strategies for College Success

JOHN BADER

2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bader, John B., author.

Title: Sending your millennial to college : a parents guide to supporting college success / John Bader.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017046660| ISBN 9781421425825 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421425832 (electronic) | ISBN 1421425823 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421425831 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: College student orientation. | Generation YEducation (Higher) | Education, HigherParent participation.

Classification: LCC LB2343.3 B34 2018 | DDC 378.1/98dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046660

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

To my late parents, Bill and Gretta Bader

This little book began as a conversation with Greg Britton, of Johns Hopkins University Press, as we discussed the second edition of Deans List: 10 Strategies for College Success. Since leaving Hopkins as a dean, I had worked for organizations focused on K12 education, and I had learned much about parent-student dynamics. More directly, I then was the parent of a student heading to college, and my perspective had shifted on the role parents could play in college life.

Deans List now reflects those lessons in its second edition, but I wanted to create a parents guidebook to serve as a concrete bridge between students and their parents. I wanted to address parents directly, encouraging them to have healthy conversations with their children in college. The book you hold is the result, and I want to thank Greg for encouraging the project and his team for nurturing it from draft to publication and helping it find you.

This guidebook owes much to the same cast of characters as Deans List does, primarily my colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. I want to highlight two of those people, Dan Weiss and Paula Burger. Both of them helped me to grow as a leader and as a person, and they encouraged me to reflect, to write, and to publish on the challenges my advisor colleagues and I faced every day.

I have tried not to embarrass my older son, Calvin, now at Dickinson College, with too many stories found in the following pages. If I have, too bad. His younger brother, Eli, is happy to be exempt. For now. As always, I am grateful for the love and support of my wife, Amy.

I have written most of this guidebook in my early tenure as executive director of the Fulbright Association, the official alumni organization of the scholarship. I appreciate the support of my colleagues Shaz Akram, Michelle Dimino, Kelsey Poholsky, and Alison Aadland. The associations board of directors, led by Nancy Neill, is helping me to thrive in a gracious and innovative atmosphere.

I am lucky to be serving a community that means so much to my family. I was a Fulbrighter to India, as was my father to West Germany. My parents, who were Pomona College classmates, married while on that Fulbright to Germany, and they lived an international life committed to public service and the fine arts. They encouraged my siblings and me to experiment, to travel, to learn, and to serve. They let me choose my own college, my course of study, and my life beyondknowing that I wasnt always making good choices. I miss them very much, and I dedicate this guidebook on parenting to them.

SENDING YOUR MILLENNIAL TO COLLEGE

It would have been a quiet summer day. Summer, yes. But quiet, no. My wife and I, along with our younger son, watched in awed silence as the Dickinson College campus in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, swirled around us. College campuses have two moments of stunning optimism: the day the freshmen move in and the day the seniors all graduate. We were on a quiet island, witnessing that incoming student migration, a moment of excitement, possibility, wistfulness, and fear.

All around, there was the ordered chaos of getting keys, making beds, finding bathrooms, meeting roommates, identifying landmarks, grabbing food, and wondering what to do next. Having worked on a campus much like Dickinson, I expected this, and I smiled, sensing the familiar anxieties felt by each generational wave of students as they wash ashore on a campus.

What I did not expect were my own feelings. Of course, I had known this day was coming, when we would take our older son to college. My wife and I had braced ourselves for the pain of separation, for the worries about whether he would be happy, for the uncertainties of his independent life, and for the redefinition of our lives without him home every day.

But I didnt expect to feel left out. As the three of us watched, our college freshman helped his new dorm-mate from China get the right room key. He figured out where to get his picture taken for his ID card. He told us where the pre-orientation program meeting was, and we followed him dumbly. We stood outside the crowded meeting room, where he learned where to meet the students he would join to spend three days rock climbing.

And then he said, OK, its time for me to go.

What? Wait a minute. This is it? Youre going? My brain and my heart just stopped. This is the moment? I struggled to realize what was happening, as my wife took pictures of our sons hugging each other, and as we four folded one another into a family embrace. But I felt like I was floating, unclear and uncertain. Weird, really. I was disconnected, left out, undefined. Sad, as expected, but what were all these other feelings?

And then he was gone. I stumbled toward the car, vaguely aware of the importance of this moment. Its a wonder I didnt drive us off the road on the way home. There wasnt a lot to say during that drive, but plenty to think about, starting with how I was supposed to change as a father. How much was I supposed to let go? What role was I going to play now? How much trust do I have that he will make good choices?

I have been an educator, professor, dean, and administrator nearly all of my professional life. I have given a lot of thought, based on those years of experience, to what my son and students like him need to do to succeed. Those lessons can be found in Deans List: 10 Strategies for College Success, which anchors this companion guide. So, on that summer day, I had a good idea of what my son should do. But I wasnt really sure what I should be doing.

That is why I offer you this modest guide to parenting a successful college student. I needed a way to process my new role, and I think you will find the thoughts, suggestions, and strategies found here to be useful. This guide flies next to