Getting Your Kid Off to College

They say kids should be independent and take responsibility for their own college applications, but if I did that my kid wouldn't go to college until he's 40 (if then).

We'd been asking our son for two years to narrow down his choices for college so we could have an idea of the program requirements and general acceptance criteria for each. Every time we'd ask him if he'd given it any more thought we got the Standard Kid Response of rolling the eyes. He knew what he wanted to do with his life, but the problem was getting him interested in the concept of doing something about it.

We tried to help him out by offering to drive him to the narrowed-down list of choices he was considering. So we put the child in the car and drove two hours to one of his choices and as we're driving around exclaiming about the wonderful campus ambiance, he was in the back seat with his iPod headphones in, reading a book. He couldn't have cared less about what the college looked like. If the fear of Social Services hadn't stopped me, I would have pulled over and pushed him out and had him walk home.

Once we finally understood his decision to go wherever he was accepted -- regardless of what the school looked like, or how many pizza places were within walking distance -- we set about the business of applying.

Back in my day, applying to college was as simple as getting a brochure from the high school guidance counselor and then sitting down and filling it out and mailing it in. These days, you need a college degree in order to apply to college.

You'd think the Internet would have simplified things instead of making them more difficult, but you'd be very wrong. Have you ever tried applying for a job through an online job database? Applying for college is no less difficult. First you have to fill out an account application on their web site and then you get to fill out the actual college application. The time it takes to find and then completely fill out said college application is approximately 2.5 years, and then when you finally get to hit Submit you will get an error message saying "Page not found" or "Online session expired" or "What an idiot you are to take 2.5 years to fill this out! What kind of moron are you?" It's at this point that you're glad you only had one child, because the idea of going through this multiple times with multiple children makes you want to run with scissors.

My favorite thing about the applications were the questions that could not be answered. It's quite possible that these types of questions are put on college applications for the very purpose that they cannot be answered and they want to know how the student responds in such a situation. Whatever the reason, I found them simply annoying. It already takes 2.5 years to fill these applications out, so, Application-Preparer, don't add another six months by making me think any more than necessary -- because the only conclusion I will come to is that someone needs to slap you.

The best example of one of these types of questions is the type that asks you for your current employment information, and then the form requires an "ending" date for that employment. Well, if you're still employed, there is no ending date, Application-Preparer. We chose to handle this situation by putting the "ending" date five years in the future. The system wouldn't accept the application without a date, so there you go, a date that is worthless. Either they liked our way of handling it or they didn't even read the application, but nevertheless his acceptance arrived within two weeks.

Some colleges are very quick to reply to applications, but others think that they are the end-all and be-all of higher education so they take their own sweet time in processing and responding to your child's application. I find this humorous since once you have any college credits under your belt you can transfer in with ease, so why do they make the first year so difficult? I think the answer is because they can. So, one of the colleges has already given us an answer, and the other one is making us wait for their decision until the end of March. Oh, we're so intimidated.

As an aside, I would like to have a quick discussion regarding college mascots. If a student were to choose a college based on the mascot alone, I think most would choose not to go at all. For instance, our son would be choosing between a wolf and a pirate. Now, a wolf has some semblance of normalcy, but a pirate? Really? How anyone thought that would be a good mascot, I can't imagine. There are lots of animals to choose from in the animal kingdom, so how they arrived at a pirate I will never understand. And a bright purple and yellow pirate, to be precise. Why not have a fairy princess for a mascot? Or how about a circus clown? Or a ferret, maybe?

Back to the topic at hand, students should be automatically accepted to the college of their choice just for successfully managing to complete and submit the application. I feel like I deserve a medal just for not throwing the computer out the window each time we got an error on a form. And when the acceptance arrived, I felt like it should have had my name in parenthesis under his. When he gets his diploma in four years, I will happily take that as my 'thanks' for all the hard work that went into getting him there in the first place.

So, in conclusion of Part I of this series, my advice to all you parents out there with children approaching high school graduation: Get rid of all the scissors in your house.