The Neurotic Parent

Last week a San Diego family stayed with us while on their college tour.  These savvy people waited to look at schools until after their child had been accepted.  Not only do I admire their attitude about the process, but their daughter is so impressive that I plan to hire her the second she graduates from UCSB. 

Maybe the thing to do is spend the spring break of junior year studying rather than looking at colleges.  Most eleventh graders are not interested yet anyway, and those who are rarely use rational criteria to evaluate the schools – One of CJ’s friends said that he didn’t like Amherst because the dorms, with their hardwood floors, were "too nice".  Another reported that "all the kids" at Wash U St. Louis had "bad music" in their I-Pods. 

And if your kid does fall in love with a university on a college trip, it’s probably not because of the academics or even the sports facilities, but because he or she happened to have a cute tour guide or a great cheeseburger. 

So when contemplating a college tour, maybe it is wise to think more about the food and less about the colleges.  If you decide you must go, the next few posts will highlight some of the hidden gems where we ate during our odyssey.

Tonight a family from San Diego will be staying with us as part of their college tour.  Because they are not neurotic people, they did not spend time or money looking at colleges until after their daughter was accepted.  Now they are on their way to check out UC Santa Barbara.  I was hoping to get material from them about the college process in a more laid-back part of the state.  But that will have to wait until tomorrow, because they have stopped to shop in Costa Mesa and won’t be here for several hours.  So I will blog about the anxiety that still lingers with parents of twelfth-graders, although most of them now have their decisions.

Because the college admission process this year was the most selective in the history of the world, I have found that people don’t just tell you where their children were accepted, but also where they were rejected, waitlisted or deferred – all for no good reason other than that they were born in 1989 or 1990.

In the past, if you asked someone where their son or daughter was going to college, they tell you the name of the school they planned to attend.  But now, you’ll get an answer like "She got into BU, and was waitlisted at Georgetown, Tufts, Wesleyan, Northwestern and even GW."  Or: "He’s deciding between Emory and Wash U St. Louis, but still hoping to hear from Stanford."  This is usually followed with a horror story about another child: "My niece, who was a Congressional Page, really wanted Penn but she was never able to get her SATs up over 2200, and she ended up being rejected everywhere except Indiana and Boulder."  Or: "Our friend’s son, who won all these oboe competitions, was waitlisted at Bard and Skidmore, and only got into SUNY Purchase for February."

I’m afraid that because our kids are not getting into their first, or second, or fifth or ninth choices, for their entire lives they will remember the list of all eighteen colleges where they applied.  They will always feel obligated to remind people about the insane competition they faced in 2008-9.  When someone asks them where they attended college, they will rattle off the whole slew of places that turned them down, or even worse, kept them dangling.  They might forever hold grudges against fine universities, and not even want to take their kids on a college tour.  They could end up like our friend who is 52 and very successful, but still mad at Columbia because he never got off that darn waitlist. 

There are all sorts of rumors floating around our community about brilliant, qualified teens who did not get into college this year.

Heard that one girl showed up at her high school after spring break wearing a sweatshirt with the name of a college that did not accept her.   She supposedly told her friends that she was offered a spot at that university, but was taking a gap year instead.

Ran into someone in a restaurant who said the valedictorian of a top private school was admitted nowhere, not even into two of her safeties.  The same anxious mom reported that a boy she knows was rejected from a school where a building is named after his uncle.

Driving around like traveling salesmen was the easy part of this process.  Now the party’s over and it’s crunch time: SATs, SAT IIs, ACTs, APs, finals, summer job, start a foundation, invent a software program, write about it in an essay.  And even kids with perfect resumes are in for disappointment.

But there’s an alternative: For $40,000 you can hire Michelle Hernandez, the nation’s premier college consultant.  She has a 95% success rate for students getting into their top-choice schools (but she will rob you of those fun teen years – prevent you from being a camp counseler and force you to attend a nanotechnology program instead.)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_43/b4055063.htm

If you can stomach the piece about Hernandez, you will see that even though she attended Dartmouth and Columbia for her BA and MA, she got her PhD at Nova Southeastern University in Florida because she needed a "quickie doctorate" for credibility.  But even more interesting is that she’s "hoping to link up with a travel consultant, someone who could plan family trips to visit colleges."

Neurotic Parent’s Exotic College Travel Tours – the perfect new career for me.  I will get you a late checkout at the Colgate Inn, arrange for you to board your Southwest flight in Group 1, and make sure your Garmin will get you onto the Grand Central Parkway.