Yet another hilariously true essay/piece by the great Joel Achenbach, perfect for parents with kids about to enter college, called Endless Search for the Right College.
We don't take family vacations anymore, we just make college tours.
Over the past couple of years, my wife and three daughters and I have
mined a thick seam of colleges in the bedrock of the Eastern seaboard,
including William & Mary, Penn, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, U-Mass,
Amherst, U-Vermont, Skidmore, Bard, Cornell, Hamilton, McGill,
Dartmouth, Bates, Bowdoin and SUNY Geneseo. We've also been interested
in Wesleyan, Lafayette, Bucknell, Penn State, Colgate and Hartwick.
Also Oberlin, Ohio Wesleyan and Wisconsin. And Colorado, UCSD, UC Santa
Barbara, Reed and Whitman.
And the University of Guam.
And the College of Antarctica.
And Venus A&M (scorching, but a great environmental science program!).
Why, you may ask, did we narrow our list to just 750 colleges and
limit our search to the inner solar system? Because we're Americans,
and more than anything else, Americans like to have a lot of options.
We have created for ourselves and our progeny what you might call
the Options Society. It's a society in which people are encouraged to
keep their options open. The normal state of affairs for college
students, for example, is to keep all the most obvious career options
— screenwriter, performance artist, eco-tourism guide, reality-show
contestant, graffiti artist, sommelier, parasitical layabout, etc. —
on the table as long as possible.
Because of the Options Society, kids don't apply to three colleges,
or five, but routinely 12 or 15. My oldest daughter, a high school
senior, has a classmate who applied to 21 colleges. Technology makes it
easy to cast a wide net, for you can tour colleges via their Web sites,
and many accept the "common application."
Options have proliferated in America as the hypersensitive marketing
forces figure out precisely what individuals want. This is why, when
your kid asks you to buy Honey Bunches of Oats cereal at the grocery
store, you have to reply, "What kind of Honey Bunches of Oats cereal?"
Because "honey" is just one of the many flavors of Honey Bunches of
Oats. (A key principle of modern America is that everything — possibly
including automobile tires — must come in a cinnamon option.)
So just imagine how confounding is the college quest, with so many
great schools, so many potential courses of study and such a wild world
of possibilities. Our kids have been told since birth that the sky's
the limit. We're the generation of parents who never learned how to say
no. We feared that saying no would damage self-esteem and cramp the
imagination.
But have we deceived our kids about the way of the world? If you're
17 years old, the economy is in the most serious recession since the
year of your birth. Even those of us with all the advantages find our
options narrowed, our worries piling up, our sense of affluence heavily
eroded.
What do we tell our Bubble Economy kids?
Isn't it too late to give them the big Life Is Hard speech?
When I go into that mode I can see the eyes glaze over; all the kid
hears is "Mwah mwah mwah mwah Great Depression mwah mwah mwah Dust Bowl
mwah mwah mwah . . . ."
Maybe somewhere along the way we should have mentioned that life isn't really about options, but about decisions.
[The piece goes on for a while: Click here to keep reading.]
Kit Stolz 