The soundtrack in my head is Roy Orbison singing "It's over, it's ooooooover," and it doesn't matter that the "it" for him was a love affair and not a college app. Plaintive heartbreak is plaintive heartbreak, and any parent or senior obsessed enough to have invested wholeheartedly...

A man I know who is old enough to have multiple grandchildren still gets whiplash if a pair of long legs in high heels walks by. This is fine by me (okay, slightly less than fine if I'm in the middle of making an astute comment when his attention wanders)...

Ah, the holiday season. The familiar aromas of traditional festive meals, free shipping, sales that seem to start earlier every year, reunions with loved ones, mysterious new air travel fees, hot chocolate and egg nog.

And early-decision deferrals.

And the official start of the...

In truth, I have let myself down too often, book-wise: When you read a lot for work, collapsing with a good book after dinner can feel like something less than a holiday. After a long day at the computer, I yearn to do something else - make a pie crust,...

It's almost over except the waiting: Deadline season is upon us, and before you can say "spell-check" all those apps will be out the door. Like many families, you probably embraced the popular and seemingly logical approach and sent the school's own application to your first-choice school to show how...

It has been a rough couple of days for ambitious African-American college students. First, historically black Lincoln University is about to graduate the first class to have to satisfy a weight requirement : A student with a body mass index (BMI) of over 30 has to successfully...

The most important five minutes of a college tour are the ones where you pick up your registration I.D. or sign in, confirming that you have shown up in person. What you learn afterwards may help you decide if the school is right for you, but what the school...

Pertinent personal history: I wanted to go to Hebrew school and landed instead in confirmation class because girls didn't go to Hebrew school in my 'burb in my era. In the final year of confirmation class, the rabbi himself came to speak to us. He was a chilly, cerebral little...

I can't think of a gentle way to say this so I'll just be frank. No one - well, there might be an exception that proves the rule, but essentially no one - is going to accept a college applicant who writes like a dream about a topic no...

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in college I got a postcard from a boy in my sociology class. It read something like this: "Please, read Goodbye, Columbus right now."

So I did.

In the summer between my daughter's freshman and sophomore year in college, she stood...

A new PEW Research Center study is full of firsts: More students in college than ever before, more students completing high school, fewer high-school dropouts, more boys staying in school, more Hispanic high-school graduates and fewer dropouts, even if their college enrollment rate is flat. The black student...

Hi. Now that I know you want to spend more time with me, would you tell me exactly how much you make, how much you owe, how much you're worth, how big the re-fi is, and oh, do you own any cows?

Welcome to the world of financial...

Early decision: A senior applies to a pie-in-the-sky school in November and gets an answer before Christmas, while everyone else is still filing applications. "Yes" means that the second half senior year will be more fun than the pervasive nervous breakdown. "No," or a deferral, means joining the rest of...

The easy unplug is this: No devices while eating, period, ever, end of sentence,
non-negotiable.

The more challenging and glorious unplug is seventeen hands high, about 1200 pounds, possessed of four gears and reverse. I am a confirmed city slicker, but when I have a...

It's fall. Normal happy people watch the leaves change color, but parents of seniors care only for the stark black and white landscape of inked circles on bubble grids. Adults whose SAT prep involved two sharpened number two pencils and a good breakfast invest in test prep because we're...

I've been right where you're standing, waiting outside the college counselor's office for that first appointment of your child's senior year, trying and failing to balance absolute pride and abject panic. Let me clarify one thing before you get started: From here on in, nothing is as it seems.

It's that time of year again. All over the country, people are loading up the family car, paying airline overage for heavy suitcases, or shipping boxes of stuff to a college dorm room that is not big enough to hold half of it.

They're making sure their...

It's not for nothing that companies sign up high-profile celebrities to sell their goods: the customer's drawn as much to borrowed élan as to a product. Surely, Gwyneth Paltrow's scent of choice and the timepiece that adorns Roger Federer's wrist must smell and tell time better, respectively, than any...

So I was on a coast-to-coast flight {deep vein thrombosis?}, feeling a crick in my neck {fibromyalgia?} and a bit of the blues that sometimes set in around Colorado heading west {depression?} thinking about loosening the seat belt {irritable bowel?}, watching a CNN roundtable discussion of the health-care crisis. Polarities...

When my almost 20-year-old daughter was little, someone suggested that I not teach her how to cook, for the same reason that some people thought girls should not learn to type. If you have the skill you'll end up having to use it, was how the thinking went, so...