College administrators grumble about the rise of "helicopter parents," moms and dads who keep hovering over the lives of their children even after they leave for college.

But helicopter parents aren't just hovering. They're swooping down in attack mode.

Nearly 40 percent of first-year college students have had a parent or guardian intervene on their behalf to solve a problem at college, according to new research released this month. About 13 percent of first-year students said such interventions were frequent.

"Forty years ago, going to college was a 'breaking away' experience," said George Kuh, who directs the National Survey of Student Engagement, a massive annual study of college students that contains the new data.

That's not the case any more, Kuh said. A big part of the reason is cell phones have long since replaced the pay phone down the hall in the dorm.

Educators insist there's nothing wrong with parents taking an interest in college life. At Ohio State this year, a record 85 percent of the 6,100 freshmen brought a parent to orientation. Ten thousand parents subscribed to an e-mail list for updates from the school.

But the term "helicopter parents" has emerged to describe those who go overboard, getting too involved in solving their children's problems, preventing them from learning self-reliance.

Largely, the trend has been tracked anecdotally — in news stories about parents doing students' laundry, editing their papers, and even calling the school to complain about roommates or grades. But there's been little hard research.

This year's NSSE, however, asked a new experimental set of questions on the topic. The questions went out to about 9,000 students on 24 campuses, out of 320,000 students who participate in the full survey, which tracks all aspects of the college experience.

Among the findings: