Search

In recent years, colleges and universities have started to reassess their approach to families and redefine appropriate roles for parents. Still, we know very little about the role of institutional offices in bridging the gap between students, families, and the university or the ways their responses are organized by families' race, class, and gender. To obtain an institutional perspective on the ways in which college administrators and staff interact with families and shape policy to address their concerns, this paper asks: 1) How do college staff think about policies about families? 2) How do families perceive college personnel and how do college personnel perceive families, and how do these perceptions vary by race, class, and gender? 3) Does the view and practice of familial assistance vary by the characteristics of the college personnel in particular their race/ethnicity or gender? Drawing on 33-indepth interviews with a diverse sample of college personnel as well as ethnographic data collected at on-campus family-centered events, I find that: 1) the commercialization of higher education and the growing consumerist mentality of advantaged parents has led institutional offices to restructure its approach to interacting with families, often strategizing around FERPA/HIPPA constraints; 2) college personnel of color are frequently called upon by families of color to serve as liaisons on their behalf and are generally much more attuned to the variety of family dynamics of students of color than are white personnel; 3) college personnel work to assist students holistically, throughout their undergraduate career, but say that they interact with families mostly during times of crisis; 4) differences exist in the types of resources and information that families solicit from college personnel, which largely varies by race, class, gender, and immigration status; as such, college personnel grapple with ways of ensuring transparency to all families. This paper demonstrates that higher education policies and practices should not be thought of as "one-size-fits-all" and calls for higher education institutions to employ strategies and mechanisms that better support increasingly diverse families as a way to ensure inclusivity and student engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]