What is the passage mainly talking about A. The definition of helicopter parents . B. The content of parent-orientation programs. C. The great progress that Northeastern University has made. D. A shift in the university’s idea of schooling.
Among high-profile institutions nationally, few have taken as dramatic steps as has Northeast University in Boston. Over the past five years, to enhance its image, Northeastern University has gone against the grain and boldly recast itself, focusing on national prominence over bulk.
In the mid-1980s, it registered over 30, 000 full and part-time undergraduates; last year, the university enrolled a more selectively chosen 18, 000 undergraduates. Along the way, however, many parents have had many questions about life on and off this prominent urban campus.Actually aware of this, and of its growing responsibilities to its neighbors and the external community, Northeastern has strategically enhanced its parent-orientated programs as a way to build friends and refine its new image.According to Caro Mercado, director of the Office of Parent Programs and Services, Northeastern jointly focused its orientations for parents and students on the importance of being "good citizens and good neighbors" simultaneously. With orientation sessions that feature videotapes of campus neighbors talking about the school, with a much more deliberate system of alerting parents to the major events coming to the city over the course of the year, and with an official Parents Association that publishes its own newsletter and handbook, Northeastern tangibly makes the kinds of extra effort that parents have come to believe that it should be included in the cost of their family’s higher education①.And yet as competing colleges and universities in every sector of the country now furiously launch new parents’ pages on their websites and publish their first parent newsletters, a new tension had emerged on those same campuses: Whose first-year experience is it, anyway
The most enlightened universities recognize the need to establish a relationship with each student that respects privacy, encourages independence, and facilities the transition to adulthood. Although it may not be immediately apparent, the expectation that these skills will be delivered is precisely what parents have purchased in their child’s choice of an undergraduate degree program. Blindly continuing the same patterns of involvement that worked when their child was in high school is not the answer②.