Hard as it may be to imagine, America’s teenagers are almost as demanding as the colleges. I should know. I’ve just returned from a quintessentially American experience–taking my twin sons, almost 17 and in their second-to-last year of high school, to visit some colleges they’re thinking of applying to. In my day, we simply mailed off our applications and hoped for the best. But today’s kids expect much more. So during spring break in high schools across the country, parents and teens set out in droves, thronging college campuses, meeting admissions officers, taking tours and collecting reams of daunting information–none more so than the price tag, usually in excess of $30,000 a year.
To describe the competition as intense scarcely does justice to the adjective. Acceptance rates at the more selective universities hover in the low double digits. Harvard University received 19,009 applications for its next entering class of 1,650, accepting 10.7 percent. Yale was not far behind. Parents of high schoolers are well advised to increase the odds by spreading their bets. One colleague who set out the same week as I scheduled nine campuses on a five-day swing. If it’s Tuesday, this must be Brandeis, or Babson–or both.
My sons, Ishaan and Kanishk, wanted to stay in the Northeast–principally, I suspect, for the cable-television channel featuring their favorite ice-hockey team. We picked three: universities A and B, which feature regularly in assorted lists of the country’s top 10, and University C, one rung below. This last is known as the “safety school”–the college you believe you can get into easily because your grades and accomplishments exceed those of the average applicant.
The North American spring had set in with its usual severity when we hurtled out of New York in our rented SUV. No doubt by special arrangement with the heavens, the campus of university A was bathed in sunlight as we arrived. It was also flooded with visitors, ranging from earnest young preppies in suits and ties they would never wear once admitted to a U.S. senator escorting his daughter. In fact, demand so exceeded supply that a second orientation had to be laid on at the last minute for the overflow. After an hour’s briefing, straining to hear the priceless information above the hubbub of the crowds, we were herded outdoors. There a bouncy college senior, her own voice hoarse from projecting her college’s attainments, shepherded us around the campus, pointing out its most distinctive features and touting its extensive history and traditions. A diligent Korean-American adolescent took notes. A South Asian parent with a goatee and a camera asked persistently obtuse questions. (“No, I don’t know how many Sinhalese-speaking students opted out of the meal plan,” our guide would good-naturedly reply.) The senator signed autographs.
Mark Twain declared that he never allowed schooling to interfere with his education. In a similar vein, our guide noted that not everything you learn in college comes out of books; it’s faculty and friends who make the experience. And she seemed to believe it. My sons, for all their teenage cynicism, were duly seduced.
Predictably, it was hard to stimulate their interest in university C, the “safety”: an institution with a couple of centuries less tradition, a few million fewer books in the library, several billion dollars less in its endowment–and no ice-hockey team. University A, it seemed, had won their hearts. But then came university B. Despite a steady drizzle, we found a campus architecturally more imposing than A’s, organized into more intimate “colleges,” with facilities as lavish as A’s. The surrounding town was dowdier than the metropolis adjoining university A, but so what? University B boasted not merely the place that claimed to have invented the North American pizza but another that served beer to undergrads without too closely scrutinizing their IDs. And the South Asian kids were about to host a weekend cultural extravaganza that had already sold 800 tickets.
Decisions, decisions. As we drove home, exhausted, I turned to my sons and enumerated the pros and cons. Which would be the one college they’d apply to for early admission? “We’re torn,” came the reply. “Maybe we haven’t asked all the right questions. Maybe we need to actually spend a night in a dorm.” Their faces brightened. “We’ll just have to go back!” But I wasn’t listening. It had just occurred to me that in all the intensive exploring from campus to campus, all the comparisons of dorm rooms and faculty lists, we hadn’t thought of one simple possibility. What if neither A nor B picked them? “We’ll do three more colleges next weekend,” I said with a sigh.
