Helicopter Parents

The headline of the story is noteworthy - "I Am A College Student With 0% BAC" but for reasons that may not be obvious. According to 93,034 student responses to the 2015 ACHA National College Health Assessment approximately 21.3% of students have never used alcohol.

For current college parents, the twelve days of Christmas don't end with a partridge and a pear tree.In fact, the year-end holidays don't seem to end at all. Increasingly, colleges and universities are scheduling longer and longer periods of time between the last day of fall finals and the first day of spring semester.Beginning as early as mid-December, those of you who are current college parents began to have your sons and daughters come home for the holidays. And their rooms were probably still waiting to be cleaned from the mess they left at Thanksgiving.

Just mention the words “college admissions,” and the anxiety level for some future college parent households rises as quickly as the spring pollen count outside their front doors.Part of that anxiety, no doubt, is being driven by a recent spate of high-profile newspaper articles, followed inevitably by their cribbing on television or radio news programs, all of which are collectively making the point that college admission is harder than ever.

The share of young Americans living with parents hit a high of 40.9% in 1940, just a year after the official end of the Great Depression, and fell to a low of 24.1% in 1960. It hovered between about 31% and 33% from 1980 to the mid-2000s, when the rate started climbing steadily.