The College Insider

Imagine that an acceptance from whatever you've defined as a better school might not make enough of a difference to keep your family from enjoying the last six weeks of senior year.

The pressurized lives some high school seniors have been leading can take a toll; they maintain their perfectionist momentum for the first year of college, or two, and then little cracks start to show up in the façade.

Getting into college - any one of the colleges on your list, even the bottom-feeders, which suddenly don't look all that bad, right? - restores your equilibrium, at least temporarily.

The parent of a college-bound teen may spend most of senior year wearing a dunce cap, but come rejection time you will be expected to have a smart answer to that unanswerable question.

Last week, what was supposed to be a party turned into the full monty, protest-wise: flaming dumpsters, cops, and the occupation of a building, all in protest of a thirty-plus percent tuition hike for UC students.

I'm not saying a senior should bail altogether. But keep in mind that your senior's acceptance matters almost as much to his or her high school as it does to you.

Fit is the foundation for any successful relationship, whether we're talking about a senior choosing Reed over SMU or his parents having married each other instead of the candidates who preceded each of them.

Adapster is an iPhone or iPod app that enables a student to work on SAT test-prep anywhere, any time.

Short of the television program "America's Biggest Loser," there is probably no way to undo eighteen years of overeating, or poor habits, with a single semester of exercise.

Early applicants take up as much as 25 percent of an incoming class. If you're the kind of person who buys movie tickets on-line so you can choose the best seat, you know that the later it gets, the fewer options you have.

Some of the saddest posts on the internet -- and frequently some of the most poorly-written, which may be a clue -- are the ones from deferred students looking for a way to improve their odds come April.

The biggest increase in enrollment is at two-year community colleges. Enrollment at four-year public and private colleges is pretty static. Cost may be starting, slowly, to trump prestige.

Schools prefer to accept students who are going to accept them. One way to cut the herd is to see who cares enough to visit, and schools rely on this marker even though it's a flawed indicator.

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 much you care.

Welcome to the world of financial aid applications, in which nameless, faceless employees get to review information you probably have never told even your closest friends.

Any parent or senior obsessed enough to have invested wholeheartedly in the college application process is experiencing a profound post-deadline adrenaline deficit.

No one is going to accept a college applicant who writes like a dream about a topic no other applicant thought of if the kid's test scores, GPA, and course profile aren't competitive.

Test-taking strategies: If there's a consensus on anything, it's that your child doesn't want to spend valuable time reading the instructions for the first time on the day of the test. Before you pay for sample tests in a room at a prep center, or proctored by a tutor, consider a few free sample tests at home.

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.