Surely you don't want your daughter to end up in this kind of a relationship: The guy withholds and withholds, demanding endless evidence that the gal really loves and desires him. She pours out her heart, and still he holds back, unwilling to commit. She deluges him with letters, reveals her most intimate thoughts, asks people she thinks he will admire to testify on her behalf. He might relent in the end, and he might not - but if he does, it's conditional love. She has to keep proving herself. He warns her from the moment he takes her on - if she does anything at all to disappoint him, he reserves the right to walk away.
If you replace the male pronouns with the word 'college,' and the female pronouns with the words 'high-school senior,' you will come to appreciate what a monumental horror your daughter's last year at home may turn out to be [and it's worse for girls at the moment, since there are more female applicants than male]. One of the subjects in the recent documentary, Fired, uttered the immortal words: "Pain plus time equals comedy," but no one seems to know how much time must pass before we can laugh about the boomlet college-app nightmare. Not yet, that's for sure. Just ask the kid who posted a resentful howl of rage on the website of a particularly elite college - posted it a dozen times, in fact, so that readers couldn't avoid learning that the school had just rejected a future president of the United States.
My generation used to worry about whether the military-industrial complex guaranteed that we'd always be in a skirmish somewhere; too many jobs depended on fighting to make world peace a profitable alternative. My daughter's generation can wonder about the educational-industrial complex, from test-prep companies to phone book-sized guides, to the College Board itself, which seems to profit from every single aspect of the application process. In the world of the common application and too many applicants for too few slots, giving your kid two sharpened #2 pencils and a hot breakfast before the SAT is tantamount to child abuse. Getting into college has become big business; too many jobs again depend on it.
And don't dismiss this as sour grapes: Our daughter's going to a school she loves next fall.
The grapes are more about the frenzied process, as graduation rolls up on us with alarming speed. This was our last year together in the house our daughter's lived in all her life, and how many nights did we lose to inquiries about the one person in history she'd like to meet, or to wondering whether her favorite schools paid any attention to the new essay section of the SAT? We should have known things were out of hand when someone shared the dead-serious advice that students write big to make their essays seem longer - but it's an indication of the mass hysteria that we were instead grateful for the insider tip.
There's very little about the current process that's good for our children; certainly the wait-list, which keeps some of them twisting in the wind for yet another month, is all about what makes the guy/the school feel special. To improve their yield - the percentage of accepted students who actually attend a given school - some schools accepted fewer students this year and put more kids on the wait-list. Why? Not because it's kind to strung-out seniors, who have already been on tenterhooks since last fall, but simply to improve that yield, to ferret out who really, really, really wants to attend. I read about one school that has a wait list, and, within it, a smaller priority wait list, the latter made up of students who have yet again professed their undying and exclusive love for that institution. Families lose months they'll never get back to this kind of extended flirtation.
Few of us would be brave enough to suggest that our children return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when an ambitious applicant applied to three schools - a safety [there was such a thing, back then], a middling reach, and a shoot for the stars. C'mon, though: Boomer parents have a certain reputation to uphold. We're the ones who protested the Vietnam War and spawned the women's movement; are we really going to succumb in the face of the latest institutionalized madness? I honestly don't know what the answer is. I suggest only that we need to start looking for it more aggressively. The only thing that's "higher" about education at the moment is the stress level.