The college tour

Joan Wickersham

Enjoy the process, we’re told. Yeah, sure

July 22, 2011|By Joan Wickersham

(gabriel polonsky for the…)

WE ARE on the road, looking at colleges with our younger son. Enjoy the process, we have been told. Well, we sort of can, and we sort of can’t. He sits in the back seat, reading a book. It’s not Tolstoy or Bertrand Russell or Freud. (He probably won’t get in anywhere.) But on the other hand, it’s not a vampire novel or a comic book. (So maybe he will get in.) A lot of the time he sleeps. Asleep, he still looks like the baby we brought home from the hospital.

We pull into the college parking lot. No matter what school it is, no matter what time of day, the lot is full. So is the admissions office: packed, jammed, kids and their parents and younger siblings, slumped in chairs, or standing, shifting nervously from foot to foot. There’s always a girl standing arm-in-arm with her father, and another girl scowling as her mother urges her to pick up the brochure, and a solemn family huddled together on a couch reading the brochure.

The admissions officer comes in, expresses amazement at how many people have showed up, and moves the group over to some larger venue: a chapel, a lecture hall, an auditorium. We trail across the quadrangle after her, a big straggly shuffling mob, crossing a street, stopping traffic: make way for anxiously-hoping-to-matriculate ducklings.

Once we are all seated, the admissions officer tells us how wonderful the school is. It excels in the humanities and in the sciences. It cares about its undergraduates, despite the fact that it’s a big university. Or: It offers its students the chance to do research, despite the fact that it’s a small college. Famous people teach there. Famous people went there. It has a core curriculum, or distributional requirements, or it doesn’t, for excellent well-thought-out reasons. It has dozens of student clubs and organizations, and if the one you want doesn’t exist then you can start it.

People listen, don’t listen, whisper, check their cell phones. A mother sitting near the front takes copious notes, filling three pages of a legal pad. The presentation is mouthwatering and dispiriting. The school is very selective. The admissions officer quotes some figures: the astronomical number of applicants, the microscopic number of acceptances. “But have fun with the process!’’ she says.

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