By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, May 3, 2009
We don't take family vacations anymore, we just make college tours. Over the past couple of years, my wife and three daughters and I have mined a thick seam of colleges in the bedrock of the Eastern seaboard, including William & Mary, Penn, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, U-Mass, Amherst, Vermont, Skidmore, Bard, Cornell, Hamilton, McGill, Dartmouth, Bates, Bowdoin and SUNY Geneseo. We've also been interested in Wesleyan, Lafayette, Bucknell, Penn State, Colgate and Hartwick. Also Oberlin, Ohio Wesleyan and Wisconsin. And Colorado, UCSD, UC Santa Barbara, Reed and Whitman.
And the University of Guam. And the College of Antarctica.
And Venus A&M (scorching, but a great environmental science program!).
Why, you may ask, did we narrow our list to just 750 colleges and limit our search to the inner solar system? Because we're Americans, and more than anything else, Americans like to have a lot of options.
We have created for ourselves and our progeny what you might call the Options Society. It's a society in which people are encouraged to keep their options open. The normal state of affairs for college students, for example, is to keep all the most obvious career options -- screenwriter, performance artist, eco-tourism guide, reality-show contestant, graffiti artist, sommelier, parasitical layabout, etc. -- on the table as long as possible.
Because of the Options Society, kids don't apply to three colleges, or five, but routinely 12 or 15. My oldest daughter, a high school senior, has a classmate who applied to 21 colleges. Technology makes it easy to cast a wide net, for you can tour colleges via their Web sites, and many accept the "common application."
Options have proliferated in America as the hypersensitive marketing forces figure out precisely what individuals want. This is why, when your kid asks you to buy Honey Bunches of Oats cereal at the grocery store, you have to reply, "What kind of Honey Bunches of Oats cereal?" Because "honey" is just one of the many flavors of Honey Bunches of Oats. (A key principle of modern America is that everything -- possibly including automobile tires -- must come in a cinnamon option.)
So just imagine how confounding is the college quest, with so many great schools, so many potential courses of study, such a wild world of possibilities. Our kids have been told since birth that the sky's the limit. We're the generation of parents who never learned to say no. We feared that saying no would damage self-esteem and cramp the imagination.
But have we deceived our kids about the way of the world? If you're 17 years old, the economy is in the most serious recession since the year of your birth. Even those of us with all the advantages find our options narrowed, our worries piling up, our sense of affluence heavily eroded.
What do we tell our Bubble Economy kids? Isn't it too late to give them the big Life Is Hard speech?
When I go into that mode I can see the eyes glaze over; all the kid hears is "Mwah mwah mwah mwah Great Depression mwah mwah mwah Dust Bowl mwah mwah mwah . . . ."
Maybe somewhere along the way we should have mentioned that life isn't really about options, but about decisions.
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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.
* * *
So: She has made her decision. And now I'm the one who's panicking. Can't we go look at Michigan??? Great school! Fabulous sports teams! I'm ready for one more tour. Just imagine that fabulous Wolverine fitness center!
Surely we should think this through a bit more.
What's the rush????
I'm old enough to remember when a lack of options brought with it a certain stability and predictability. The default position for a young person was to do whatever his or her parents had done. That might include -- hold on for a startling concept -- living in the same town or city where one grew up.
And yet at some point parenting becomes meddling. It's counterproductive to the agenda. A kid can't grow up when the parent is always there, fixing mistakes, playing backup. Sometimes you have to back off. Tell yourself that your work is done.
She'll call home, don't you think?
When a parent sees a fully blossomed child, he or she also sees all the stages of the efflorescence. The little girl. The toddler. The baby. How often have you wanted to freeze time and say no more growing up, no more changing, this is exactly how I want you to be, now and forever?
But sadly that is not an option.
Joel Achenbach is a reporter on the national staff of The Washington Postand blogs at washingtonpost.com/achenblog.
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