Loco Parentis: The New College Try

"WHAT DO I wear?” Marcy asks plaintively the night before her first college interview.

“Something you’re comfortable in,” I say.

“No, I mean — do I dress up? Or are jeans okay?”

I think about it. Is a college interview like a job interview? Do you wear a navy blue blazer? The pearls and twin set? What if you always wear black and your hair is dyed pink and you have 12 facial piercings? Maybe you get plus points for piercings and pink hair these days. Why is my daughter so clean-cut?

“I’d wear a skirt,” I say tentatively, unable to get past my upbringing. Marcy’s face falls. She hardly owns any skirts, and she doesn’t like to wear them. But she defers to my wisdom, and spends two hours combing through her closet, finally assembling an outfit she likes.

“What do I say?” she asks even more plaintively the next morning, on the way there. It’s our third visit; we did a drive-through in 10th grade, an open house in 11th, and now this.

“Just be yourself.” The most useless advice in the world, and she knows it.

“Give me some practice questions.”

I’ve interviewed applicants for my own alma mater for years in preparation for this. “What three people from throughout history would you most like to have dinner with?”

“Queen Elizabeth the First. Eleanor Roosevelt. Hillary Clinton.” We’ve gone over this one before. “Is that okay? Or should I name a guy? What if the interviewer’s a guy?”

“He’ll still have heard of them.”

At the school, I sit in a handsome anteroom, clutching a cup of bad coffee, while the incredibly young admissions officer whisks her away. After half an hour, I’m invited in. “Do you have any questions?” the callow youth asks. I fight down the urge to shoot back: “If you could have dinner with any three people from throughout history, who would they be?”

When it’s over, Marcy and I walk back to the car. I can tell she’s distraught. “I messed up,” she says, at the point of tears. “He asked who I admired most, and I said Queen Elizabeth the First. And I said about how she ruled without needing a husband, and ushered in a Golden Age, and all that. But then he asked about the three people and dinner, and I couldn’t say Elizabeth the First again. And my mind just went blank. I couldn’t think of anyone else!”

“So who did you finally say?”

“Martin Luther King.”

I glance over at her, in her green paisley skirt and black button-down sweater, and I think: What a load of crap. You know what three people Marcy would really like to have dinner with? Beyoncé Knowles and Jay-Z and Orlando Bloom. And maybe she should have said Beyoncé and Jay-Z and Orlando, because it must just be hell on earth to be a college admissions officer and listen to child after child long to have dinner with Martin Luther King.

And I get a hint, at last, of why Marcy’s college application process seems so much more fraught than mine did. None of my grandparents went to college. My mom and dad met at Temple night school. They knew they were following the right trajectory, and proved it when their four kids went away to college, dorms and all, the real deal. There was a template back then for how to bring up an American child. You did better than your parents. Your kids did better than you. There was still plenty of room for upward mobility.