My son is a junior. Junior year is the Oh Shit year of high school, as in, Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take the SAT. Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take it again if I score anywhere below 1580. Oh shit, AP Calc is kicking my ass right now. There are plenty more oh shits where that came from, and they all center around that eternal source of angst for many juniors and their parents: college. The second your child is born, the specter of college colonizes your mind: the competition, the choices, and above all, the price. You and I know many parents who have been driven insane, all too early, by the college issue. They often pass that angst onto their kids, who then pass it onto their kids, and so on and so forth until you have an entire nation of people who will cut themselves if they don’t get into Harvard.
I will not cut myself if my son doesn’t get into Harvard. In fact, we’re not even going to visit Harvard, we’re just that resigned. But there are a great many non-Harvard colleges out there, and we’re out on the road all this week to visit a few of them. Oh yes, it’s the Spring Break college tour. Normally, we’d use this vacation to hit the beach, or to visit Busch Gardens in Virginia (so much easier and more affordable than Disney that we went three years in a row), or to stay at home and get on each other’s nerves. But since our son is currently running the academic gauntlet, we have to use this week to go on a school crawl. We also have to drag our other son, now 14, along with us. I promised that one we’d go out for soup dumplings as compensation for his time.
First up: a three-hour drive from our home to Faber (I’ll be using fictional college names for this story, so as not to piss off any admissions officers). Faber is a classic small college, located in a one-street town in the middle of nowhere. The place is laid out in classic fashion too, resplendent with clean brick buildings all situated around verdant quad littered with plastic Adirondack chairs. Immediately, I love it. Even at 49, I still get that rah-rah feeling anytime I arrive on any bucolic college campus. I walk around any quad and my mindset instantly shrinks back down to 17 years old. The guys here look like they could be my buds. Oh wow, their cafeteria makes burgers to order. Teenage me might have had a good time here. For the sake of all, I keep these emotions to myself.
Our tour guide is an amiable jock who’s majoring in engineering, just as our son plans to do. He takes us to all the usual tour spots: the library, the student center, the labs. My wife and I hang back, letting our son process his surroundings. You get a handful of helicopter parents on these tours, the ones who ask the guide 500 questions on their child’s behalf without letting the kid ask a single question of their own. What’s the average SAT score to get in here? Is housing guaranteed all four years? Are all of the professors here published authors? Do you accept cash bribes? My wife and I hold off on all of that tired shit. We’re the cool parents. Totally.
I break off with the 14-year-old and we find a Thai joint that makes exceptional noodles and summer rolls. This is the kind of college town where the college also owns the town, so that kids will have some place off campus to go, and so that bored parents can find something to do. The first college you visit always gets the fresh eyes advantage, so I like Faber.
I have no idea if the 17-year-old feels likewise. He’s as reserved as I am obnoxious, extremely deliberate in his thinking. So when my wife and I give him the standard interrogation after the tour is over, we get a quiet “I don’t know” to most of our questions. He’s still thinking everything over. He got a mere two hours touring Faber: two hours to see if that’s where he’d like to spend the next four years of his existence. Not an easy extrapolation by any means.
But it’s a thought exercise that every prospective college kid must attempt. A few weeks ago, I gave our son a bit of unwanted dad advice: When you research any school, close your eyes and try to imagine your life there. What does it look like? What do you look like there? The daydream doesn’t have to be accurate. In fact, it almost certainly won’t be. But it’ll still prove valuable to your decision-making process. I told our son all of that, and then he said to me, “I’m too tired to daydream,” which made perfect sense and broke my heart all at the same time. Every kid, no matter the age, should get time to daydream.
Now that we’re back in the car making the two-hour drive to our next tour stop, he finally has a short bit of time to do just that. He thinks. He analyzes. Unprompted, he starts to give us his thoughts about Faber. The campus was awfully isolated for his tastes. The engineering program had a lot of good shit, but not necessarily the exact courses he wanted. And the student body was homogenous to the point of parody. He liked the place, but didn’t love it. Perhaps our next stop—the neighboring colleges of Sunnydale and Adams—will have more of what he’s looking for.
It turns out that Sunnydale, where the boy and I tour the following morning, does have more to offer him. Its campus has more diversity in both students and architecture. It’s situated in an actual town instead of on a de facto film set (the porchetta sandwich I eat for lunch in that town causes me to immediately vault Sunnydale to the top of my personal list). It’s way closer to a big city than Faber was. And we get a tour of the engineering labs, which boast an impossible number of fabrication tools. You could build a fucking jet engine in one of these labs if you wanted to. Our Sunnydale tour guide is easily the best tour guide we’ll have on the trip: a double major who also runs track and field while also possessing a truly winning disposition. She’s cool, ergo the school is cool. Even on this day, when the weather is miserable: cold, misty, damp.
The weather for our Adams tour that afternoon is no better. Making matters worse, the admissions office is packed with hundreds of other high juniors. Our son recognizes a few of them from his Faber tour the day before. They break us up into groups and give each group tour guide equipped with a wireless mic. When we walk back out into the main quad, the touring groups stay so close together that we can hear all of the tour guides speaking into their mics at the same time. My wife is greatly displeased by the setup; she doesn’t like a school that fails to have its logistical act together. But our son, to his credit, focuses on the substance of the tour rather than the noise of it. More astounding facilities. More diversity of architecture. More everything. He’s impressed by both Adams and Sunnydale, while I have a hard time keeping the two separate once our day is over. Touring two colleges in one day is a lot to take in. All of the buildings and kids start to look like one another.
Thankfully (for the boy, not for me), we have three-hour drive that same day for him to suss it all out. We’re back on the road, on the way to our final stop: Grand Lakes University. I’m behind the wheel as night falls and a thick fog blankets the country highway. It feels like I’m driving into the afterlife. We’re visiting my mom’s house after we check out Grand Lakes, and I’m REALLY looking forward to that part of the trip. That’s the only part that will feel like an actual respite to any of us. Everything else has been a grind.
Much like being a student at Grand Lakes is a grind. This is the toughest school on the list by a considerable margin, so paying a visit here might be a waste of time. We couldn’t even get an official tour reservation, because the school is currently on its own spring break. But our son is a superior college prospect to me in every regard: straight A’s, excellent test scores, real-deal extracirriculars, etc. He’s earned the chance to at least consider Grand Lakes, even if it still won’t have him. So the four of us set out in the morning to explore its every nook and cranny. We’re building our own tour, which turns out to be even more rewarding than a sanctioned one. We meet one student working at the student union and she turns out to be—what luck!—an engineering major. She circles all of the buildings on the campus map that would matter the most to our son. From there, we sneak into the engineering building and run into one of the professors working there. And what’s this? She teaches the EXACT kind of shit our son wants to study, and she spends a solid hour talking to him about it. Then we make our way down to the fabrication labs, which boast even more space-age equipment for research. Then we walk by one of the dining halls. That building impresses me the most, because it’s very large and because I love to eat.
This is typical of me, because I had different priorities when I was a prospective college student. I went on the spring break college tour when I was a junior too, but I have no memory of asking pointed questions of my tour guides. I don’t even remember caring what school offered which courses, or any of that important shit. This is because I was a child of the 1980s, so I based my college preferences strictly on superficial bullshit. It had to be a name brand school, it had to have a pretty campus, good food, a robust party scene, and good-looking women (“talent” to use the old, sexist frat bro term). Everything else what whatever to me. I was there for the vibes.
In retrospect, it’s little surprise that I only got into one of the schools I applied to: Michigan. I went to that school for single, miserable semester before transferring to Colby College, where I was less miserable but still let down by the college experience overall. The best time I had at Colby was semester abroad. By senior year, all I wanted to do was get the fuck out of the place. I’ll never go to a class reunion there. Maybe if I had thought longer and harder on my own college tour, I would have sorted out what I really wanted, instead of what Animal House told me to want.
I have regrets about all of that. I linger on those regrets a lot, more than is healthy. I take my college memories and then privately embellish them, like a reverse-engineered daydream. Then I repeat those fantasies on a mental loop, like I’m pressing on a single piano key over and over because I’m bored. I don’t want my son to have similar regrets, even if regrets in life are unavoidable. I don’t want the boy to age into a man trapped in his own past, the way I sometimes can be. In a way, that makes me a different sort of helicopter parent. I’m not constantly poring over the boy’s transcripts like some micromanaging psycho. But I’m trying to live vicariously through his own college experience… to make sure that he corrects the mistakes I made.
I tell my son none of this. Instead, I tell him that he’s doing this tour right, because he is. On the drive to my mom’s house, he tells us that he liked Grand Lakes best out of all the schools we visited. Not because it had the wildest frat parties, or because it had a killer football team, but because of the school itself: the professors, the courses, the campus, all of it. He even bought an official college shirt from their bookstore (the 14-year-old did, too). I didn’t tell him he might be jinxing himself by getting the merch. I didn’t demand he be more realistic about this shit. And I didn’t suggest he take a second look at Faber. I simply kept my eyes on the road and let the boy dream a little.
