How To Survive A College Trip With Your Family

This has been an interesting week. I have been on college visits with my eldest son John (which explains my lack of posts) and like most things in life as an educator, you never fully appreciate a process until you go through it yourself. As I have always said one of the best things I ever did as a teacher was become a parent. Experiencing education first as a student then as a teacher and now as both a teacher and a parent has repeatedly helped me refine and clarify what I think and do.

My wife Kathy encouraged us to go as a family as leaving one son at home alone seemed sad and she wanted the two of us to support John in this process. I have to say I entered the trip reluctantly, but now am glad we all went together.

The college admission process seems different than just about every other educational experience. Different than sending your kid to the first day of school, different than playing organized sports for the first time, different than deciding on which of the two or three local high schools are best for your child. And a lot different than when I applied to college over 30 years ago.

It's certainly a lot more expensive, but I think it is different for other reasons too. It's different today because us parents seem so much more involved in our kids daily lives than our parents were. We have driven them everywhere. We have attended every game from AYSO soccer on up. We have gone to their music lessons. We have read about Tiger Moms, and free range moms and helicopter parents. We are really into our kids and this is probably the last decision that we will be able to have any significant influence on in their lives.

And we seem to be entering a period where we are doing things together for the last time. Our family is a family that has taken many road trips and as I pulled out of Winnetka last Thursday the thought went through my head is this our last road trip.

But the decisions on colleges themselves are not easy.

There is both so much choice and so little. There is location to think about; size to think about; type of student body that might be best. And then there is whether you can get in and finally the cost.

And even with all this choice much of what you do on these college visits seems to blend together. Big or small college, urban or rural, you go to an info session and then on a campus tour. Although there are differences, most of the admissions people you meet seem about the same -- attractive, cheerful, extroverted. The worry to me is that in some way the personality of the admissions folk who you interact with will affect your opinion of the college. Or worse the people on the tour with you will affect your opinion -- the ones that never stop asking questions and complain about the exorbitant tuition (like that's news).

There is an increasing tendency for some to dwell on a perceived unfairness about the process. I do not believe it is all that helpful to dwell on whether college admissions is fair or not, but based on the obsessive nature that this process can lead to, this is what seems to me to be the problem. With the increasing importance of rankings in magazines like US News & World Report, many colleges seem to be trying to increase the number of applicants they reject to increase their ranking and thus prestige. Stanford and Harvard topped the list this spring accepting 5.6% and 5.8% of applicants respectively. You expect Harvard and Stanford to have low acceptance rates, but if you look down the list and have followed college admissions over the years you will be surprised at the schools that only a few years ago were accepting 30-50% of their applicants that are now accepting closer to 10%. That leads you to think as Hamlet said "there's something rotten in the state of Denmark."

The craziness of this process resorts to biting commentaries like an article you may have seen in the Wall Street Journal last weekend To (All) the Colleges that Rejected Me. High School Senior Suzy Lee Weiss's article has earned the triple crown (most read, emailed and commented article) on the WSJ's website over the last five days. Lee's point of view is that she was lied to when colleges told her just to be herself.

Extreme as this seems, I started feeling Ms. Weiss's pain when at one college info session I attended this week, the admission officer boasted about the Mongolian goat herder (I do not lie) the University was giving a full scholarship to next year. On one level I understand the sentiment of colleges who see themselves as global universities and how a person like this and their life experience can positively affect their community and that this is really only one person out of a university of 9 or 10,000 students. But this is a process we all go through as families and when you are a parent and you are trying to support your child in what seems like a process where your child's merits are going to be weighed, you say to yourself there is no way we can compete with a Mongolian goat herder.

And frankly -- really -- who would want to. So instead of whining about this perceived unfairness, I have been reciting one of my favorite Zig Ziglar aphorisms -- "you have to be before you can do and do before you can have." To me that quote has always meant that life is a process and any one rite of passage will not be the exclusive determinant of  your life's story. In fact your college destination will be only a small part of a much longer journey one filled with many challenges -- most that you will have to face with much less support, typically much more quietly, and thus requiring much more courage.

I do not want to sound Pollyannish about college. Clearly, there are some doors that seem to open quicker for those who go to certain schools. My son and lots of kids in his class and their families have and are investing lots of time, effort and emotional energy in determining the best place to further their education. I would like the outcome of this process to be what each of them want. But I also do not want the outcome to embitter them.

I personally believe that life evens out in the long run especially if you have a vision for what you want to become and are willing to consistently apply yourself. For every successful person I know life is tough if for no other reason than they are tough on themselves.

So I am committed to not worrying about the Mongolian goat herders who might be getting their one break in an already tough life. I am thinking about figuring out how we teach kids to be, so one day they can do and ultimately they can have all of their dreams come true.