Matriculation Fixation

Matriculation Fixation

Two years ago, I was languishing in the waiting room of a Philadelphia hospital when a complete stranger unexpectedly began telling me about his daughter’s college plans. As my 79-year-old mother was recovering from major surgery that afternoon, I could not give him my complete and undivided attention. But as the briefing session wore on, I did manage to garner most of the relevant details.

The girl, bright but not brilliant, had been accepted to a first-tier university without financial aid but had also been accepted to a local, second-echelon university where she was promised a free ride. Money being tight, with other college-bound children in the family queue, the man had persuaded his daughter to accept the second university’s offe r. Now he was worried that she would one day rue this decision. Because she would be graduating from a less prestigious institution, fewer contacts would be made and fewer doors would be opened. Her degree would put her within striking distance of the yellow brick road, but not physically on the road itself.

As a man of the world accustomed to being told the most intimate details about complete str angers’ marriages, careers and hobbies, I had long ago acquired the requisite skills to mediate this crisis. I told the man that many of my high school chums had graduated from the second-tier university in question and had gone on to live rich, full lives.

I told him that I myself had graduated from a second-echelon Philadelphia university not unlike the one his daughter was entering, and had managed to carve out a nice little niche for myself. I told him that my college days had been among the happiest of my life that the sun never set without my thanking God for the illumination and inspiration provided by my talented, dedicated professors. Pressed for biographical data, I explained that I was a freelance writer, ticked off a list of my credentials and said I was pretty happy with the way my career had turned out.

The man had never heard of me, had never read an ything I’d written. Though he tried to feign interest in my pathetic curriculum vitae, I could see that he was devastated. By following an academic path similar to mine, his daughter, who was also planning a career in journalism, was going to end up as big a failure as I.

I never did find out why he was visiting the hospital.

I mention this incident because it illustrates the neurotic gabbiness that afflicts parents when it comes time to send their children to college. I know whereof I speak. Next fall, my daughter goes to college. Three years later my son will follow suit. I will be sorry to see them go; over the years they have proved to be remarkably amusing. But every dark cloud has a silver lining. Once my children have left the house, I will never again have to participate in a mind numbing discussion about where my children or my friends’ children or my neighbors’’ children are going to college, and why. On this subject, I am completely tapped out.

This lack of interest does not stem from pure selfishness or unalloyed contempt for other people’s offspring. Rather, I feel this way because I find almost all conversations about the college

selection process to be banal, self-aggrandizing, self-flagellatory or punitive. I’d rather talk about cribbage.

The most infuriating conversation is the one where the parent clearly seeks a decisive, career-validating moment of emotional closure. Such individuals believe that securing admission to a top-flight university provides a child with an irrevocable passport to success, guaranteeing a life of uninterrupted economic mirth. Parents such as these upwardly mobile chuckleheads exude an almost Prussian belligerence when announcing their children’s destinations, congratulating themselves on a job well done, while issuing a sotto voce taunt to parents of the less gifted. For them, the hard part of child rearing is now over. Junior went to the right prep school, made the right friends, signed up for the right activities and is now headed for the right school. Now we can get the heck out of here and move to Tuscany.

But in reality, life doesn’t end at age seventeen. Or twenty-one! In real life, some children get the finest educations but still become first-class screw-ups. My own profession is filled with people who went to the right school but ended up in the wrong career. Some of those boys and girls most likely to succeed are going to end up on welfare or skid row. At which point they’ll need parental input. Or cash. A parent’s responsibility doesn’t end once the kids leave. A parent’s responsibility never ends. That’s why Nature gives you the job.

A second, far more numerous class of obsessives consists of people who suddenly realize that their Brand X children aren’t going to make the cut. Seventeen years of unread textboo ks, unvisited museums and untaken A.P. Courses are now finally taking their toll, and those grandiose delivery-room dreams of Amherst, Bard, and Duke are suddenly going up in smoke. Bashfully, shamefacedly, miserably, these parents now mumble the names of the glamourless institutions their progeny are skulking off to. Invariably, they are colleges you never heard of in towns no one wants to visit in states whose capitals only repeat winners on Jeopardy! can name. The market has spoken, the glum parental expressions seem to say. My child is an idiot.

But once again, reality has a way of upsetting the worst laid plans of mice and Mensa. Some kids are late bloomers. Some kids are better off in a less competitive environment. Lots of people achieve huge success in this society without a degree from a prestigious university. Just because your child has failed to clear the first, or even the twentieth, hurdle doesn’t mean you should disown him. Matisse didn’t get rolling until he was in his forties. Bill Gates, Dav id Geffen, Michael Dell, Graydon Carter and Madonna are all college dropouts. Ronald Reagan attended tiny Eureka College, while Warren Buffet went to Football U in Lincoln, Neb. Despite what you may have read in F. Scott Fitzgerald (who dropped out of Prin ceton in 1917), life doesn’t have just one act. There is often Act II. And Act V. Not to mention the sequels.Matriculation fixation reaches its dottiest form during the obligatory campus visit. Here it is never entirely clear what parents are looking for, particularly in high-profile institutions whose renown has in some way preceded them. During a recent visit to M.I.T., I watched the first seconds of an admissions office video poking fun at the university’s reputation as a nerd factory. While my wife and daughter watched the rest

of the video, which assured applicants that M.I.T. nerds were hard to find, I took a stroll around the campus. I saw a lot of nerds. And I do not mean this as a criticism.

Later that morning, a guide showed a bunch of us around campus. At one juncture, she pointed out a restaurant where students could grab a fast, inexpensive meal. “How much?” asked one high-strung mother. “About eight bucks,” she was told. The woman shuddered, noting that forking over for dinner every night could get pretty darned expensive.

“It’s going to cost you grand to send your kid to school here,” I interjected. “Don’t start worrying about dinner prices.”

Since that visit this fall, this incident has become an invaluable part of my repertory. Now, whenever I am dragooned into the 30,000th interminable conversation about the college selection process I indicate that sedulous monitoring of on-campus restaurant prices should be a vital component of the winnowing procedure. People who hear me say things like thi s can’t decide whether I am insensitive or ornery or flat-out dumb. Well, let’s just put in this way: I was never M.I.T. material.