The importance of connecting with parents

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The debate about how much parents should be involved in students’ experience of university is not a new one.

As young people take their tentative first steps into adulthood, working out the amount that parents and families are going to be involved can be tricky, and even fraught. As this Wonkhe article asserted, when it comes to the “overlap” of family and university, “the duties and responsibilities of one [will] affect the obligations and requirements of the other”.

But what about the role of parents at the very earliest stages of university life, before the decision of where to attend has even been made?

How much should university marketers be considering parents in their comms?

A lot, says Mark Garratt, director of marketing, communications and recruitment at Anglia Ruskin University. The institution has “started to see a much larger number of parents coming to open days over the last few years”, he explains, and in the wake of the pandemic, and with the associated concerns around safety and security lockdown, there came to be a “greater need to engage with parents than ever”. 

Emma Leech, global marketing director of marketing and communications at Heriot-Watt University, says that the combined forces of increasing expenses around both tuition and cost of living, as well as the reduced ability for schools to connect with universities during the pandemic years, meant that parents have “stepped more forcefully into the mix” in recent times. 

And so, she says, universities should be aware that “there's something absolutely mission critical about parents as gatekeepers”.

“I don't think we do enough with parents. The question is, what are you doing to educate them and make them really understand the art of the possible?”

"I think particularly for parents that maybe haven't been to university, and maybe have a couple of kids in the house, how are we talking to them? How do they think about potential accommodation costs if they're struggling to pay the bills? How do we normalise it so that there's a real understanding about the support that's available, and the opportunities and the doors that education can open up?”

Competitive parenting

The difficulties around getting the right information to this group can be clearly seen in the “competitive parenting” that takes place in online spaces around the cost of university, she continues.

“I don't think that's helpful for many families, but we do see quite a lot of it on forums for parents,” she says. “It’s things like how much are parents giving their son or daughter, and other parents saying ‘Well we can't afford to give anything at all, so she's going to have to work’ and worrying about that.” 

Questions for parents

Jane Robinson, associate dean of marketing and student recruitment at Teeside University, likewise says that this kind of cost anxiety is “definitely something that we have to look at with students and their parents as well”. 

“There is a very active Facebook group called What I Wish I knew about University, with around  62,000 parents on there. They're all asking questions about university, about how stressed their sons and daughters are with exams.

“When I worked at the University of Sunderland we did a 10-day live helpline for parents on this site so they could ask individual questions. They were asking on behalf of their children, but we could see they were also asking on behalf of themselves. Some applicants don't want the parents involved and some absolutely want the parents involved. But I think it's about understanding what everyone needs, and who will be affected by those decisions.” 

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