The average college student interacts 13 times a week with their parents (Hofer & Moore, 2010). Most people born in the 1970’s or earlier probably remember interacting 13 times a year when they went to college.

Parents are much more involved in their students’ lives compared to previous generations, and that trend is increasing.

At CampusESP, colleges and universities often ask us what other trends we see with parent involvement and whether there are opportunities to engage with specific groups of parents.

Our benchmarks are constantly evolving, but one trend jumped out at us recently:

Hispanic/Latino parents interact with their parents more frequently than other ethnicities.  

• Hispanic parents are 18% more likely than other ethnicities to engage their students on a daily basis.

• 39% of Hispanic parents interact with their students at least once a day, compared with 32% of the general parent population.

We know that parent/student interactions, while noteworthy (and maybe surprising!), don't necessarily mean a strong correlation with academic success. However, when parent interactions are focused on academic advice, there is a very positive relationship with academic success (see our previous blog post).

Although Hispanic students show high parent involvement trends, those interactions are not focused on academic advice.

How can schools focus those parent interactions on conversations that will help their students?  It may be that colleges just need to offer more focused parent programming on the types of advice parents should provide during college.