<p>@GFG, wouldn’t anything that the institution does that links activity directly to student ID be considered invasion of privacy and thus it would not be able to stand against legal challenges? </p>
<p>Whenever news surfaces like this, not only it breaks my heart but it just raises my fear to a higher level. I always has this fear that, no matter how closely you monitor the kid’s daily activity, it just doesn’t take long for the irrecoverable result to happen. Even if you monitor the kids daily, it will be almost always too late. Nothing can replace parent’s effort to ‘feel’ the kid’s healthy state on an ongoing basis. Parents should err on the safe side and do not blindly think their child will be safe. Via texts, emails, calls, whatever. Last Spring when there were three kids died over a two week span, I suddenly increased frequency of my contacts with S, but my W talks to the kids nearly daily and have a sense what type of activity and pressure level the kids are at.</p>
<p>My son just moved to a city where he knows NO ONE and he is living alone. You bet i make sure to touch base with him. Until he develops a local support group of friends I will be texting him once a day. I often threaten to tatoo his name on him in case anything ever happens to him while he is out running or biking. He laughs but I’m somewhat serious. I’d get him dog tags if I thought he’d wear them.</p>
<p>Anyway it’s not the schools responsibility to make sure our kids are okay. College students are very egocentric. You cannot rely on them to think about aquaintences. It’s just not what they do. It’s up to his circle of friends and family. We all have to look out for one another. There is no guarantee that this will keep us all safe but it’s all that we have.</p>
<p>This is a tragedy that could happen to any one of our kids. I’m sorry for this young man and his extended family.</p>
<p>I think privacy issues also limit mental health screening. Last year my D was aware of a situation in which campus health services deemed a student a potential “threat to the community” based on complaints from other students, but could only encourage the student to seek help. The student refused. Similarly, this year, there is a student who other students know is in trouble. But campus staff can’t just say “Hey, I hear you might be trying to kill yourself/at risk of a drug overdose/an acoholic/bulimic/anorexic/mentally unstable.” The person really has to seek help, or else be found in a seriously compromised state somewhere public.</p>
<p>This might perhaps be an issue of semantics, but the schools SHOULD assume the responsibility of keeping the students safe. This does not mean that school should have the responsibility of tracking down activities of students on a 24/7 basis, but the general responsibility remains in their hand.</p>
<p>The reality is that schools make an effort to convey a message that time has come for parents to allow their children to act independently and responsibility and enjoy loose monitoring. Schools make an effort to separate the parents from their children’s records, be it academic and medical. They also make the effort to pretend that all be well and that no dramatic concerns are warranted. </p>
<p>While the issue of individual responsibility remains paramount, it’s a fact that parents are often lulled in believing that schools offer much community support. This is not often the case. </p>
<p>Yeah, yeah, we know the story. Students should be responsible and act as adults. Go walk on any large campus at around 10PM on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, and you might review how responsible students are at 17, 18, and older.</p>
<p>Fwiw, test how welcoming schools are in terms of parents “interference.” How easily could you get anyone at the school to check on your child this SUNDAY? How easily could you warn someone of a possible concern about health or safety, again this SUNDAY? How easily could you communicate with teachers or advisors regarding academic concerns?</p>
<p>Without looking it up on the website, do you have an emergency phone number and the number for the school?</p>
<p>Yeah, yeah, we know the story. Students should be responsible and act as adults. Go walk on any large campus at around 10PM on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, and you might review how responsible students are at 17, 18, and older.</p>
<p>I don’t see how they could do this. In loco parentis died decades ago, and so did the multitude of rules and controls over student behavior that went with it. Without those controls, the college basically has no idea what students are doing most of the time and therefore no way of ensuring that they do it safely.</p>
<p>I am concerned that some parents have a mistaken sense of security about their college student’s safety. It’s important for parents to realize that in most college situations, nobody is checking up on or looking after your child in any coordinated way. Services of all sorts – including academic advising and mental health counseling – are available, but in most instances the student must seek them out; the providers of services will not seek out the student.</p>
<p>You realize that there are a lot of students. Also, a large percentage of them are commuter students at community colleges and local state universities (and would be a lot harder to keep track of beyond registration and class matters from the school’s perspective even if the school wanted to). And a large percentage of the students at the same schools are part timers or non-degree-intending students (e.g. someone who wants to learn a foreign language by taking a course at the community college).</p>
I totally agree. The well being of a student first lies with the self, next with parents, then with family and close friends, and then the community at large including the college community. From the on-going effort to ‘feel’ the healthy state of kid, if the kid feels to be under inordinate amount of stress or sounds depressed, then take no chance, do something – such as make him or her know that s/he is not alone, pack some home made cookies and ship to the kid, etc. etc. Actually this is what my W does, a few times for my freshman kid already and many times so far for the junior kid. Any stressful state that is well above norm, parents should do something for kids feel loved, not alone, etc. Whatever the school does will be already too late and parents should never have that false sense of security even if you want to give them space and freedom and indendency that they crave for. FWIW I am not a religious man, but the safety of young adults can not be gambled.</p>
<p>Suppose a high school teacher or GC had concerns about a student managing college life, whether in general or in specific about a certain school or housing situation. Most of us would not want that person, (who might be completely accurate in their assessment, or who might also be mistaken/stupid/vindicative) to nix our child’s chances for admission by raising that concern in the rec letter. Certainly, they could not and should not say anything revealing about the mental health of the student. The parents should be guiding their student toward a place where s/he could reasonably expect to succeed. However,in two situations my D has knowledge of which concern freshmen, it’s hard to imagine that no one back home knew there was a problem that would eventualy de-rail the student at college, since it was pretty obvious immediately. Not sure what could have prevented the crash and burn, if the parents were enabling or unaware.</p>
<p>I think it pretty ridiculous that anyone ask the institution to be responsible OR for college counselors to be judge and jury of any student’s mental health. Screening every freshman? Please. Look. We do not abdicate our parental responsibilities because we want our children to succeed where we did not, have opportunity that we did not or even if we did! There is little a school or any community could do if the person fails to seek help at any point in the spiral.</p>
<p>Hindsight is the hardest part of suicide. Often a person seems to be getting better, finding happiness again etc, when the reality is that they have resigned themselves and are at peace with the decision to leave this world.</p>
<p>Suicide and accidents are leading killers of young people. Hardly an uncommon thing. Even back in my day the only death during my HS days was a suicide. Same in college plus a few car accidents usually far away from campus.</p>
<p>Not a lawyer, but wouldn’t the information collected have to be disseminated in some public fashion or be highly intrusive for it be considered invasion of privacy? </p>
<p>Anyway, how much would tuition have to increase to cover the installation of such a monitoring service at all cafeterias, dorms, libraries, etc. as well as the appropriate personnel and equipment to monitor this system? And what are you going to do with it … Johnny hasn’t swiped into his dorm or the cafeteria in 3 days … How do you ascertain that no one has seen Johnny elsewhere, or that he’s holed up in his girlfriend’s single and they? To make such a system work would require such a level of reporting-in on the part of the students that it would be unappealing to most.</p>
<p>It is theoretically possible that if a school goes to a card key system (to allow for easy deactivation of lost keys, easy making of new keys to replace the lost ones, and easy changing of allowed access for each card holder – this is common in hotels and workplaces) that the capability to track individual movements would come with the system. But there would likely be a lot of resistance from a privacy standpoint to actually tracking and recording individual students’ movements.</p>
<p>I don´t think it would be that difficult to have a program to do it, 1) check to see who have not swiped their cards for dorm entrance, food, activities…for more than X days, 2) send an automated email or text to such students to ask for a reply, 3) if no response is received within Y hours, notify RA/advisor, 4) RA/advisor checks up on the student, if everything is ok, then turn off the alert.</p>
<p>We do that at work. We monitor suspicious business practice by monitoring employee´s use of their security card and computer usage. We alert their security officer if we think there is something suspicious. It is up to the security officer to verify.</p>
<p>1) check to see who have not swiped their cards for dorm entrance, food, activities…for more than X days, 2) send an automated email or text to such students to ask for a reply,</p>
<p>Ah - that’s the key - asking the student to verify before escalating to parents, security, police, etc. Makes more sense. I was envisioning a system that automatically notified security if the card hadn’t been swiped in X days.</p>
<p>When my daughter went away to school, I told her to introduce herself to her neighbors and to get to know them, not as friends, but as acquaintances, so she would know what was going on in her “neighborhood,” so to speak. I also told her to make sure at least one person met her date before she went out with him and knew his name. I pointed out that it was a good idea for at least someone to know where you were going if you were to leave campus…us or a friend, whatever.</p>
<p>I can promise someone would have noticed if my daughter went missing for a week. I taught her how to make sure people knew who she was and where she was. I think this is more effective than a key card idea. It puts the responsibility and power in the hands of these young adults, and teaches them a few things about safety.</p>
<p>YMMV</p>
<p>Regardless, my heart goes out to the family.</p>
<p>A more effective (though intrusive) system would be to check whether a student has logged in to check his/her email in the past X days and maybe cross-check it with the key-card (key cards are actually common at MIT for getting into dorms). Though there are people living other than their dorm room for significant periods of time, MIT students check their email obsessively.</p>
<p>Either way, I think it is unlikely that this would prevent a suicide.</p>
<p>That is a great idea, esp because D’s college is a women’s college and she needs to go elsewhere to meet guys … and now you are scaring me! Well, maybe I’ll just start a program to micro-chip every male between the ages of 18 - 22 in the greater Boston area, that should solve the problem.</p>