Joel Achenbach on the Endless Options of the College Tour

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The Fiske Guide to Colleges weighs as much as a small dog. Once you hit 10th or 11th grade -- and belong to the segment of society for which not going to college is the only option completely off the table -- the college brochures start gushing through the mail slot like blood in a horror movie.

Then comes the reconnaissance of CollegeWorld. When you go on a tour, you always wind up in the fitness center, which is always new, gleaming, with heroic equipment and giant flat-screen TVs, the largess of rich alums. There are never any students on hand, for some reason -- they are presumably off somewhere smoking pot and/or learning to hate their parents in a class with a title like "Patriarchy, Parentage and Progeny: Narratives in Resisting the Oppressor from Oedipus to Abbie Hoffman."

The quest is an anxious one, because it's all so competitive. The dirty secret of the American educational system is that there's a glut of good kids -- excellent grades, first-rate test scores, a blizzard of extracurriculars. We've all read the stories of the despairing admissions officers wading through applications from one overachiever after another, cursing the gods -- "No, not another valedictorian!"

My daughter applied to 11 schools and got into most of them and has excellent options. My life is over, but she will be happy. I am now a machine for generating tuition money, but she will prance among the flowers in an existence marked by pure possibility.

She has narrowed her decision to a final pair of schools, one conservative and traditional, the other liberal and experimental. The first is so old-fashioned that she would have to wear a hoop skirt to class. The second is a place where I believe clothing is optional.

As we toured one of the schools, a professor of environmental science asked her: "Are you more interested in the policy side or the science side?"

Undecided, she said. I wanted to whisper in her ear: "Science! That's the correct answer! He's a scientist so you should speak dismissively of policy!"

But you can't answer for her. She's almost on her own. And you beat yourself up, thinking of all the things you forgot to teach her, including the useful trick of telling people what they want to hear.

Picking a major is obviously problematic for any student in the options era. To mitigate the pain of such a thing, many students now have double majors, or they minor in something or get a "certificate" in a program. To give themselves more time to sort out what they want to do, kids today often take a "gap year." This is when they rattle around the planet in a frenzy of self-indulgence. There's an entire Gap Year Industry now, coming up with new ways to relieve parents of their money.

May I note that it was only recently that we came up with a very long, very indulgent gap period for young people between childhood and adulthood, which we dubbed "adolescence"? In the old days, you hit puberty, you went straight out into the fields, or into the mines. No agonizing over what to do: You just started digging.

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