Some of you just enjoyed a holiday season. I hope you had a nice time.
But if you were a high school senior, or have one in your family, the last two weeks of December was the time of trial.
Oh, there was some singing and some presents around Dec. 25. And some toasting and a TV picture of very cold people in New York on Dec. 31.
But if this was the week that most of your college applications were due, those events took a back seat to short answers and personal essays, designed to reveal your true inner self while at the same time showing you in the best possible light.
In less than 500 words. Try it sometime.
This was the lot for my oldest daughter, Lydia-Rose, who made it through nine applications in the last two weeks without losing her mind – despite the constant offers for help and guidance from her two extremely anxious parents. Now, for her, it’s just a matter of waiting.
For her mom and me, it’s time to fill out financial aid forms and help the institutions determine our “expected family contribution” if they decide that they want our kid to attend. A friend explained the formula they use this way: They figure out how much you’ve got and then they take it.
So here we are, post-Jan. 1, with most of the applications in and most of the agonizing work done, and what have we learned?
There has got to be a better way to decide where a kid should go to school. The system we have now stresses kids, stresses families and leaves too many people out.
In the end, does it really do a better job of matching students and schools than picking names out of a hat?
The whole process is brutal.
First, there’s the number of schools. My kid is applying to 10 (the current nine and one with a mid-January deadline) most with its own essay question.
If you are older than 30, you probably think that we are insane to apply to so many. We may be, but 10 is a totally normal number.
We were advised to have her apply to at least eight. I know someone who applied to 16. This is just how it’s done.
The reason is cost. Every school has a sticker price, but no one can tell you how much it would actually cost for your child to attend until after she has been accepted.
Each school has its own way of determining a family’s financial need and offers very different aid packages to the students that they want. For most middle-class families, this is the more important than acceptance when it comes to deciding where to go.
The other is selectivity. The schools with the most money for scholarships are the elite institutions with names that everyone recognizes.
An acceptance to a selective university is like hitting the middle-class anxiety lottery. Not only will your child enter the work force with a bullet-proof credential on her resume, but it also won’t cost too much. Whereas the same student could end up waiting tables into her 40s to pay off the loans for that degree from a small liberal arts school in the Ozarks.
The elite schools also resemble the lottery when you calculate the odds of getting in. Harvard turns down 93 percent of its applicants. Yale, 91 percent. Princeton, 90 percent. Many other schools reject two-thirds of the people who apply, and if you have your eye on any one of them, it better not be the only thing on your list.
For the schools, which publish these numbers, the more selective they appear the better. So they spend millions every year to attract applicants who they can later reject.
With thousands of colleges to choose from, what kind of information is out there for students and families to make a good decision? The answer is not much.
You get a lot of advice, and when it comes from me, don’t expect it to be too helpful.
“You should look at this like buying a house, not like deciding who to marry,” I offered once, thinking it would put everything in perspective for my daughter.
I was thinking that she should be cold and analytical looking at schools, and not just fall in love with one. (When you are picking a spouse, falling in love is a good thing.)
She was cold and analytical, but it was with me. “I’ve never done either of those things,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You can rely on the schools for information, but they quickly start to look alike. According to the brochures, every college has attractive young people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who are working on improbable double majors but still have time for glee club.
Then you go visit and find that every school has immaculate freshman dorms, a new gym and the second-best food for a midsize school in the region.
Things that shouldn’t matter in the decision-making process (a rainy day, an annoying guide, the admission lady’s rash) do.
After a few tours, you wonder what anyone could say that would be helpful.
“What would you like to know?” I asked Lydia-Rose once, after we bagged a college tour between the gym and the dining hall, and we were looking across a Western Massachusetts valley last autumn.
“What I can’t know,” she said. “I want to know who my roommate is going to be, if I’ll like my professors, stuff like that.”
More than a year later, those are still good questions.
Greg Kesich is an editorial writer. He can be contacted at 791-6481 or at: gkesich@pressherald.com
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