Michele R. Mahoney, assistant director of graduate admissions at Wheelock College, was startled to hear an applicant’s father on the other end of the line.
She had left a message for his son, an applicant to the master’s-degree program in social work. The father explained that he had returned her call because his son was busy doing music therapy with elderly people in New York.
He went on to compare his son to the prodigious cellist from the film August Rush, arguing that his son’s artistic gifts made up for relatively weak academic credentials.
“We don’t even have a degree in music,” she remembers thinking.
Thus began one of the many uncomfortable encounters that graduate admissions officers, not used to parental meddling, say they are facing ever more frequently.
“Helicopter parents,” already ubiquitous in undergraduate admissions, are invading the graduate-school process, too, driven by the rising cost of advanced degrees as well as by hard-to-break habits of coddling.
Some of these parents have become so aggressive that they’ve required a new moniker: “snowplow parents,” for their impulse to push obstacles out of their adult children’s way.
“It’s the new norm,” Thomas P. Rock, assistant dean for enrollment services at Columbia University’s Teachers College, says of parents’ involvement in graduate-school admissions. “It’s the Gilmore Girls phenomenon. Moms want to stay best friends with their daughter and all her friends.”
Mr. Rock has fielded calls from more than one set of parents about the status of a student’s application. A few times, when he asked why the student couldn’t have called herself, the parent said she was out shopping at the mall.
Parents call Teachers College professors to complain about grades. They descend on weekends set aside for visits by prospective students who have been admitted. One student’s family came dressed in matching plaid Burberry jackets.
“It’s just something we’re not used to,” Mr. Rock said.
The boundaries for parents haven’t always been so malleable, says Monica K. Ingram, assistant dean for admissions and financial aid at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law. When she started working as an admissions officer, 12 years ago, “it wasn’t necessarily intuitive” that parents of applicants in their mid-20s would still advocate on their children’s behalf, she says.
Now, in order to accommodate the droves of parents who accompany their children on campus visits, the law school has quadrupled the number of admitted-student days it holds.
At Teachers College, Mr. Rock plans to assemble an advisory panel for parents on admitted-students day this spring. Current students, parents of past students, and admissions officers would offer tips on how to guide a child through graduate school. The college already welcomes parents to take part in chats over coffee with admissions officers.
He sees this as a generational phenomenon. As students in the millennial generation apply to graduate school, Mr. Rock says, neither students nor parents seem to want to give up the handholding practices that were honed in undergraduate programs.
Trusted Partners
Rather than fight that new reality, Mr. Rock encourages colleges to embrace it. Parents can be trusted partners, he argues, and colleges can attract more applicants by also wooing the parents who increasingly serve as their landlords and benefactors.
“They’re huge stakeholders,” Mr. Rock says. “When an institution turns up its nose to parents, it’s a problem.”
One father from Long Island, who didn’t want his name used for fear of damaging his children’s educational prospects, is shepherding a son through medical-school admissions. He pored over his son’s recent “letter of intent” to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, at Yeshiva University, wanting to do what he could to help him move off the wait list.
The stakes are high, the father says, and his son has trouble judging what admissions officers want to see.
“There’s so much money involved,” he says. “My wife and I are investing in our kids’ future by staying involved as parents and as coaches.”
Anna Ivey, who founded an admissions-consulting firm and used to serve as dean of admissions at the University of Chicago’s Law School, says rising tuition and escalating debt levels have given parents more reason to get involved.
“The anxiety is real,” she says. “It’s often a family investment because the consequences of that investment radiate out for the whole family.”
In fact, a number of Ph.D. students who offer accounts of their finances in an online spreadsheet of information about graduate-school debt say their parents helped pay for their living expenses.
Value of Independence
Parents tend to stay on the sidelines when their children are applying to graduate programs in arts and sciences. It’s professional schools, especially business and law programs, that get swarmed. Professional-school applicants, who often apply directly out of college, don’t always have a clear sense of their career goals, creating an opening for parents to intervene.
In response, some graduate schools have tried to select self-starting applicants with the personal skills to contribute in classroom discussions and the workplace.
Northwestern University School of Law, for example, fills its class almost entirely with students who have had at least one year of full-time work experience. Johann H. Lee, assistant dean of admissions, says via e-mail that because those students tend to be older and more self-reliant, admissions officers rarely interact with their parents.
Elsewhere, some graduate-school officials urge undergraduates to rein in overzealous parents and retake control of their applications. Wheelock’s graduate admissions officers have set up informational events where they tell undergraduates of the demands of graduate admissions. Speak for yourself even if a parent is nearby, the college tells students, and do not allow a parent to influence your essays or personal statement.
That kind of advice may sound rudimentary, says Ms. Ivey, the consultant, but loosening parental bonds can help students make a good first impression.
“When you’re in graduate school,” she says, “you’re developing a professional reputation, and it starts from Day 1.”
Sometimes, though, staying open to the joys of helicopter parenthood can pay unexpected dividends, says Mr. Rock, of Teachers College. He remembers a mother and daughter who visited on an admitted-students day. The daughter grew visibly bored, convinced that Teachers College wasn’t the right fit, while her mother’s enthusiasm only grew.
“By the end of the whole visit, we ended up recruiting the mom, not the daughter,” Mr. Rock says. She applied, enrolled, and graduated in 2012, with plans to become a teacher.
