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How many of you reading Inside Higher Ed today are also a parent of a college student?
What have these last couple weeks been like for you?
I have two daughters in college. One is a senior and the other is a sophomore. Both of my kids’ schools have moved to remote classes for the rest of the semester.
Experiencing COVID-19 as a parent of college students has been informative. I’m acutely aware of the anxiety and stress that the pandemic is exerting on our students and their parents, as I’m experiencing those feelings firsthand.
My kids are incredibly lucky and hyperaware of their privilege. They have parents with resources, a safe and welcoming home, and access to knowledge to help them navigate their radically changed semesters.
I know firsthand how vital timely and detailed information is at a time of crisis. I’m as dependent on those communications as any parent, even with my front-row seat to how higher ed is responding to COVID-19.
I get that students and their parents can adapt to big changes in how their college experience, but they can only do so when decisions are made promptly and communicated with care.
As a parent, I’m grateful for the effort that the leadership of my kids’ school has put into communicating.
Witnessing how university leaders must make hard choices with limited information in a fast-changing environment, I’m grateful for the college and university leaders who are willing to make the hard calls.
I also know firsthand how hard the people who work at the universities that my daughters attend are working to rapidly enable students to learn remotely, as I see that same work dominating everyone’s days at my institution.
For a great many of us who work in higher ed, the work is deeply personal. We are not only faculty and staff. We are parents of college students.
We do everything we can to do everything we can for our students, just as we know that our colleagues are doing the same.
And to be clear. Every higher ed person -- parent of a college student or not -- is equally committed to the mission of serving students. (And their families.)
It is also true that higher ed people who are living through the impact of COVID-19 on their campuses, while also trying to help manage the impact of the pandemic for our college-student children, are absorbing stress from both ends.
This COVID-19 experience may give us some insight and empathy into how the actions of the university may feel to students and parents. But our stress level is no higher, our commitment to students no greater than those of our colleagues who are not parents of college students.
We are all in this together.
Thank you to all the people who are doing everything they can to keep my kids safe while also enabling them to keep learning.
Are your kids in college?
