Each year we survey parents across all our CampusESP partner schools. The process is managed by our Customer Success Team and is free for all our customers.

This year the survey was completed by 7,991 parents from 50 participating colleges and universities. So what did the survey find? Let’s get to it…

GUEST POST by Brian Watkins, Director of Parent and Family Affairs at the University of Maryland and former President of the Association of Higher Education Parent/Family Program Professionals (AHEPPP).

With an aging database on life-support, and a desire to engage families with a more robust email platform than MailChimp, our office needed a tool that could better meet our needs.

After partnering with CampusESP, we’ve increased our overall campaign reach by 8x. 

We know that helping parents help their student get off on the right foot is critical. That’s why we’ve pulled a list of our most popular content, classified by type, to share with families of first-year students. We analyzed over 261,000 clicks to help you best support your first-year families.

In December we sent our annual customer satisfaction survey to more than 200,000 parents. These are our key takeaways.

Student debt is at an all-time high: $1.5 trillion. Parents represent the fastest-growing demographic absorbing student debt, up 71% in just 5 years.

We partnered with the good folks at Ovum to release a compelling infographic that connects the increase in student debt to the increase in parent involvement. Ovum is the market-leader in data, research, and trends in higher education.

What kind of information do parents actually care about? And when's the best time to share it? Based on real content performance data from more than 300,000 parents using CampusESP, we have the answers. 

We've analyzed thousands of clicks on student success news, deadlines and advice to map out your content calendar for the next year.

GUEST POST by Katie Matthews (Parent Program Specialist at Baylor University)

The Baylor Parents Network started using the CampusESP parent portal in June of 2018. From prospective parents to parents of current students, read about their experience.

Student persistence can increase by up to 15% when students share key aspects of their academic and financial record with parents.

Student Persistence Increases with Parent Engagement features findings from a study about parent engagement and student persistence based on 993 students enrolled at Abilene Christian University (ACU) in the Fall of 2016.

GUEST POST by George D. Kuh, PhD (Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at Indiana University and a member of CampusESP's Advisory Board.)

It stands to reason that the right kind of partnership between institutions, parents, and students will help more students thrive in college and complete their educational program in a timely fashion.  It is hard to imagine a more promising, cost-effective, and personalized approach to increasing student success.

Parent contact information is a hot commodity in higher education. Parents can help you reach your higher ed goals… if you know how to reach them.

Students whose families are involved with CampusESP are more likely to persist. 

CampusESP sponsored an analysis of parent engagement and student retention at CampusESP partner institutions. The more frequently parents “connected” with their student through CampusESP, the more likely the student remained enrolled and made progress toward completing their degree.

It's hard to look past benefits gained from parent engagement, whether you have a dedicated parent engagement department or not. Here at CampusESP, we like to call it 'nudging the nudgers': keeping parents informed and up to date can only help students stay on track to graduation. 

Laura Hamilton, a sociologist at the University Of California Merced, recently broke parenting into four categories in her book "Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success".  She was also recently interview on Chicago Tonight, where she discussed these categories.

College websites — often run by the marketing department of an institution — serve many functions, but they typically focus their communications on prospective & current students, and alumni. Parents provide a unique challenge to the communicators in higher education...

Previous CampusESP analysis has shown that parents providing academic advice has apositive relationship with academic success.

By building bridges with African American and Hispanic parents (parents who are asking for more involvement anyway), colleges can help those students be more successful.

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.

CampusESP recently released “Meet the New Digital Parent in Higher Education”.  The results validate the cultural shift occurring with parent involvement in higher education.  Parents are more involved, more connected, and have higher expectations than ever.