These days, stellar grades aren't nearly enough for admission to good colleges

To what sort of heartache can one night of passion lead? Well, this sort: sitting in an overchilled lecture theater 17 years later listening to a college admissions officer go over the many reasons your child should apply to her college and the many reasons she probably won't get in.

Yes, it's college visit time again, when high school juniors across the land embark on journeys with their parents into the dark, ivy-covered heart of academia. I didn't recall the process being quite so agonizing with our older daughter, and then I remembered: I didn't go on very many college visits with her. My Lovely Wife did those trips. That Gwyneth now attends a small women's college in Saskatchewan founded by a Methodist fur-trapper should in no way indicate that my wife dropped the ball.

Still, I vowed to do things differently with Beatrice, to approach this important decision scientifically, to help her scrutinize the ever-rising stack of brochures that came through the mail urging her to consider engineering at Spud State or environmental science at Valkyrie U.

The aggravating thing about the college application process is that it involves, by necessity, teenagers. As for teenagers, well, let me put it this way: A childless friend recently remarked disapprovingly, "What's up with all these parents letting their teenagers sail around the world alone?"

To which I replied: Have you ever lived with a teenager? If parents had their way, you'd be able to walk from Rehoboth to the Canary Islands atop the bobbing decks of sailboats skippered by banished 17-year-olds.

And yet it is these easily distracted bundles of roiling hormones that must apply to college.

These days, getting into a good college is so competitive. You're more likely to be attacked by a shark -- on land -- than to get into some of these super-exclusive universities. The brochures make that clear. How can anyone compete with the students smiling from those glossy pages? The little profiles of successful applicants are just depressing. Beatrice, I know you're taking a full load of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes, but would it have killed you to have spent your summers building schools in Africa or setting up clinics in Appalachia? Remind me again why you're not an Olympic figure skater?

We went on one college tour where the admissions officer suggested that students who had written peer-reviewed articles submit them along with their applications. The problem with the American college is that to get into a good one, you have to have already gone to college.

It's not like that everywhere. I was looking at the application for Oxford University the other day. There was a section that read: "Our students run numerous extracurricular clubs and engage in community service. But like most United Kingdom universities, we do not assess our applicants on those characteristics."

In other words, they don't care whether your kid wrote a smash off-Broadway play or brought clean drinking water to a sub-Saharan village. It all comes down to his test results.

Not here, where each part of the application process -- essay, optional essay, list of leadership roles, teacher recommendation, non-teacher recommendation, interview -- is an opportunity to mess up and face rejection.

On a recent Monday, I was in a leafy Northeastern city, freezing in a lecture theater and marveling at how deftly the admissions officer delivered her somewhat contradictory messages: We really, really want you to apply. Hardly any of you will be accepted. I felt like I was standing in line outside a trendy nightclub trying not to tick off the bouncer. Aren't I wearing the right clothes? Isn't my money as good as anyone else's?