"helicopter" parents

My friend Inda is always commenting on the differences between genereation X-ers and generation y-ers, especially the roles that parents play with these two groups. As an admissions counselor, it seems as though increasingly I am interacting with parents, not students. I decided that college admissions was a career that I wanted to pursue because I enjoy working with students, but I'm not "teacher material". I have much more respect for a student when they call me to discuss their academic standing or their potential for admission rather than having their parent call. Certainly I believe that a parent knows their high school aged child fairly well, but how can parents have the audacity to "overlook" grades or sat scores as strong measures of evaluation when it comes to the college admissions process? Too often I hear "Sure, my kid has a 2.3 and an 800 on the SAT, but he's president of the green leaf club and he plays 3 varsity sports, and he volunteers for his church, etc, etc, etc". That's great, but your kid is a crummy student and we're an institution of higher learning. Shouldn't grades and standardized tests be the best way to determine admissions. We're not hiring for a job, we're making decisions about who would be a good fit for the college level curriculum that our school offers. Comments like "my child is a bad test-taker" or "my child had a rough time transitioning" are turning me off to the parent already. What is their student going to do when in the college atmosphere when their parent will no longer be able to make excuses for their poor performance?

I truly believe there is a college for everyone and that everyone deserves a college experience (my first professional experience helped me to see that), but that college for everyone isn't necessarily a competitive or highly competitive institution. Parents need to realize that if their children's grades are suffering, some of the extracurriculars have to go. A strong GPA is most important to every college admissions counselor that I've ever met.