Loco Parentis: The New College Try

The soft, bright cocoon I’ve woven for my daughter over the past 17 years is starting to unravel. “I’m not good enough for Penn, am I?” she asks forlornly, paging through The Best 361 Colleges 2007.

“Penn would be lucky to have you,” I say fiercely.

“Penn doesn’t think so.”

College may be hard. But nothing could be more brutal than this admissions process, in which the child I’ve tried to protect against every bump and bruise to the ego is dumped into a meat grinder with the other 3.2 million high-school seniors who’ll graduate this year.

I SAW IT coming. Saw it looming, rather — Kilimanjaro rising in the distance, while we were drawn relentlessly closer and closer to its imposing bulk. Marcy was still in diapers when I began to fret about her educational future. The New York Times was filled with stories about cutthroat competition for elite preschools on the Upper East Side. I had my daughter enrolled two days a week at the YMCA. This was not going to give her a sufficient edge when it came time to apply to Harvard and Yale.

What choice did I have, though? We were scraping to pay the Y bill, on the combined earnings of a writer and a musician. So I took intellectual refuge: Marcy would be creative. She would be a free spirit. She would think outside the box, like her dad and me. And so she forged her way through 13 years of public school, while I kept reading frightening articles about parents finagling every which way to seduce colleges into taking Junior on: Send him to a private school that costs as much as Princeton. Donate a couple hundred thousand bucks to the college of his choice. Pay a few thousand more to send him to Africa to build water systems for a summer — won’t that sound impressive in the (professionally coached and edited) entrance essay?

I felt inadequate — and confused. My parents never sent me to Africa before I applied to college. They surely didn’t donate any money. I don’t recall them so much as glancing at my entrance essay.

In contrast, Marcy and I began visiting colleges when she was in ninth grade. (We saw 30 altogether.) I spent more nights than I can tell you poring over websites and college guides, trying to figure out where my outside-the-box-thinker would be happy — and where she could get in. I paid for three rounds of SATs, plus one of ACTs (just in case). I even offered Marcy tutoring — not the $5,000, 300-points-guaranteed kind, but a software program focusing on her weak point, math. Marcy wasn’t having any. She, the little idiot, was trying to enjoy her high-school years.

I knew I was being crazy. What worried me was that I wasn’t being crazy enough — that Southeastern Pennsylvania was filled with moms and dads who were gladly shelling out for the $5,000 tutor and that Africa trip. And at the same time, I was trying to pretend to Marcy that the whole process wasn’t important, that it didn’t matter where she went to college so long as she was happy and fulfilled. She wasn’t fooled a bit. Somehow, the free spirit had figured out how much was at stake.