Even for average parents, the letting go is difficult ? more so, they and many others say, than it was for parents of college-bound freshmen in decades past. Robin Kramer recalls how her own parents, who never attended college, dropped her off with a trunk full of belongings at Drake University, also in Iowa, in 1978. She set up her room and attended orientation without them there. “Its just what you did then,” she says. It was much the same for Paul, whose father took him to the University of Wisconsin in 1977 and then went fishing. But some say its often hardest for parents, who remember the days of college when there were fewer support systems in place for students.
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