Thanks for your reply. The problem is that it shows to many friends. At one point the friend count for one user showed 14 even though there are only 5 test users. I tried deleting the number in wp-usermeta in the hopes that it would refresh but no luck. I have created and deleted several accounts, the friends number will go up but never down again.
I’m not quite sure how to do this. I was thinking of just creating another field in the profile and filling it in with either professor, student, or parent of student. Can I use this field to filter on? Am I making things more complicated or am I heading in the right direction? Thank you again in advance!