PSA 1: Many (most?) colleges have parent pages on Facebook where you can ask other parents anything you want about their knowledge and experiences with the school. The pages are helpful to get information for you and/or your student.
PSA 2: Do some research before asking questions. You may have heard the saying that “there are no dumb questions.” Nobody really believes that. For example, don’t ask what days they get off for Thanksgiving. Look on the published calendar. But, it is reasonable to ask when most kids leave for Thanksgiving.
PSA 3: This is really why I decided to post. Remember that there are other parents that are also reading your posts. Loudly complaining about certain things, like your kid’s roommate will potentially get back to your kid or that roommate. Posts like “my son hated his roommate from the moment he met him, but he figured out how to get through the year” can be seen by that roommate’s parents or get back to the roommate through others. So, be careful what you post. Your kid might not be happy with the airing of their issues, and you may be hurting another kid.
I once saw a parent talking about how lonely their freshman was and how much trouble he/she/they (I don’t remember the gender) was having making friends. Another parent offered to share their own freshman’s contact information via DM so that the two could connect and potentially be friends. Neither parent apparently had their child’s permission to do this. Not surprisingly, the whole thing blew up and the original parent made a follow up post about how their kid won’t speak to them anymore. So friend match-making also probably not a great idea on parent social media, especially without your kid explicitly asking for it (and I can’t imagine any kid asking for that).
Also, a number of pages purporting to be run by parents are run by some group (I forget the name now, it’s been a while) whose main purpose is to advertise stuff. This was particularly the case with “class of…” parents vs the general parent page. So be careful to ensure that it is a genuine parent page.
And some pages are better moderated than others. I’ve seen some devolve into awful squabbling.
My D24’s school’s parent page is tightly moderated. Just the other day, someone posted a question akin to “what days do they get off for Thanksgiving” and another parent made a snarky response. The moderator simply replied, “We don’t talk like that to people here. Offer something helpful or keep scrolling.” I loved that!
If you have something that you do not want going public about your kid, it is possible to post anonymously, at least on the parent facebook groups I am on. Of course, you still need to be cautious about how you describe the issue so that it’s not immediately obvious who you are talking about.
And remember that if your kid bombs an exam, ranting and raving how the professor/exam is unfair on social media will advertise to everyone that your child didn’t do well.
Which reminds me of a very persistent posting parent about two years ago who made repeated posts about how entitled, privileged, incompetent, etc the faculty of a certain college was because his daughter was having difficulty securing letters of recommendation.
Also, this is not as dumb a question as it might seem and one where you can get valuable info from other parents. D19’s college officially only had the Thursday and Friday off, but generally profs would cancel lectures on the Tuesday and Wednesday as well, so that would be useful insight that is not on the university calendar.
As someone who has worked in higher ed for years, let me also add that there are A LOT of admin and professors in these groups (the school where I used to work actually paid extra comp to staff to quietly monitor those groups). Your child’s advisor or professor very well may read what you write about them.
I recently saw this question asked at a large public known for having a lot of out of state students, some parents unknowingly give bad advise (official days off are only Wednesday through Friday), some replied that their student never had to attend classes that week. Unfortunately more parents than not reported their students not only having mandatory classes, but exams as well, and not yo book non refundable flights (fortunately my daughter had close relationships with her professors and would ask the first week after receiving the syllabus, and would usually get accurate answers, even if she didn’t like them).
Luckily here in the US “non refundable” usually means you get flight credit if you cancel so rebooking is generally not an issue…did that a few times with D19. (Of course, rebooking for flights during thanksgiving week in particular can be an issue with both availability and cost.)
My daughter usually booked united basic economy and would save $100 booking non refundable. If she didn’t have her car there she would try to fly out of the local regional airport, which was 40 minutes from campus instead of 2+ hours, so even if she booked refundable the prices would go up quickly.
