Loco Parentis: The New College Try

WHILE DRIVING DOWN to Virginia and up to Maine and across the PA Turnpike these past four years, I’ve had plenty of time to contemplate why my generation is so bugged about getting our kids into college. Part of it — but not much — comes from the kids themselves. “I want to go someplace people have heard of,” Marcy says longingly, by which she means people here in our small town. Trouble is, they’ve heard of West Chester and Penn State, and they’ve heard of (some of) the Ivies. They’re unfamiliar with, say, Bowdoin or Kenyon. And I’ve discovered the one true and complete failing of my kids’ otherwise pretty decent school district: The guidance counselors seem never to have heard of Bowdoin or Kenyon either. Kids here don’t venture that far afield.

I hate that Marcy looks at college as a one-up game, but I’d be lying if I said I blamed her. I’ve had my gut twist increasingly tight as my friends and siblings safely settled their offspring — at Penn, Amherst, Columbia, William & Mary — while I wondered: Will mine measure up? There would be undeniable snob appeal in saying casually, “Oh, Marcy’s going to Brown.” But the extent of my anxiety, the time and energy I’ve devoted to the college search, tells me there’s more at stake.

Modern child-rearing is all about control. We don’t wait to pop our babies out; we schedule C-sections at our convenience. We don’t let our kids suffer the vicissitudes of fate; if they’re not doing well in first grade, we demand a change of teacher. (And if that doesn’t work out, we waltz off to a different school.) If they’re being picked on, we don’t tell them to settle it on the playground; we inform the principal that unless that bully is expelled, our attorney will be in touch.

And it works out okay, for the most part, because the kids sense that we’re doing our best, doing what we can, and besides they’re really busy, what with the violin lessons and the traveling teams and the cooking classes, and so it goes, and we feel justified, because after all, we’re doing it for them — working the insane hours, always driving them someplace, suing over who gets to be valedictorian. It works out okay, that is, until we realize that the college admissions process isn’t just beyond control for most of us; it’s so cloaked in mystery that we can’t even figure out how to cheat.