It began with a trickle. That’s why I didn’t notice anything at first.
“Who’s going to Kent College?” I asked innocently enough, fingering the brochure that arrived in the mail one day. There was, of course, no answer, since no one in the house had ever heard of Kent College, much less expressed an interest in it.
“Occidental College?” I called out the next day, when the mail fell through the slot. “Who in his right mind would go to an overpriced money trap like Occidental College?”
It was a rhetorical question, as I’ll explain in a moment, and it too was met with silence. On the third day there were two envelopes, also from schools I hadn’t heard of, and then four the next day, and the next. Within a month more than a hundred promotional brochures had been stuffed through the mail slot, bursting with color photos of cheerful undergraduates and printed on paper as thick and voluptuous as the leaves of a rubber plant. All of them were addressed to my 16-year-old son. The boy was being solicited, as surely and shamelessly as a sailor on the docks.
I’ve now come to realize that this windfall is only the first sign of college madness–a relatively new disease that has grabbed middle-aged American parents by their wattles and ear-hair and shows no signs of letting go. The disease can strike you unawares, as it has me, or the parent can become an active participant, goosing the madness along.
I think of an acquaintance, for instance, who asked me not long ago how our “college tour” was going. She saw my puzzled look and explained. The college tour is a symptom of the disease in its advanced stage: an elaborate, expensive series of visits to college campuses, where student sherpas lead herds of potential applicants and their parents from one green quadrangle to another, in and out of classroom buildings and through the lobbies of dormitories, imparting information about the marvelous variety of dining hall food, the wonders of school nightlife, the easy access to reproductive health services, the limitless potential of lacrosse, football, and basketball teams, and–if there’s time left over, and assuming the subject comes up–the education the college offers its students.
“I hadn’t even thought of a college tour,” I told my acquaintance.
“Ooooh,” she said. “Baaaaad dad.”
She herself had already undertaken several college tours with her children. She had also begun working on her daughter’s “résumé.”
“Résumé?” I said.
A further symptom of college madness, as I should have known already, is the professionalization of childhood. As the number of applicants increases, competition for the most desirable schools becomes cutthroat, so the ambitious, forward-looking parent will design his child’s teenage years to accumulate experiences that will gild a résumé–also called, with disarming candor, a “brag sheet”–and inspire the admiration of a college admissions committee. The nationwide mania for high school Advanced Placement courses is one consequence of childhood résumé-building; the alarming rise in “voluntarism rates” among high school students, particularly in their junior year, is another.
As I’ve now come to learn, more often than not the AP classes don’t earn the advanced place in college that students expect. But this doesn’t matter–just as no one seems to mind that volunteer work done purely for the sake of personal standing isn’t voluntary by any common definition and certainly isn’t evidence of the selflessness that voluntarism is supposed to denote. The bizarre illogic of these schemes is part of what it means to go college crazy. That goes double for the economics of the thing: Average tuition has vastly increased in the last generation, as any parent soon discovers, and the increase in tuition has increased demand for student aid to pay the tuition, which colleges then feel compelled to raise to pay for the increased student aid.
As for the remainder of the tuition–that portion not covered by student aid–it must then be provided by the parents, who work overtime in America’s marvelous market economy so their children can spend four years in the care of college professors who despise the market economy and the bourgeois buffoons who work in it overtime so they can send their kids to college, where, coincidentally, the kids will acquire a degree that does next to nothing to prepare them for working in the market economy.
The insanity is pristine, perfectly uncontaminated by common sense. Only a country as rich as this one could afford such a fanciful indulgence. It calls to mind the old phrase from the 1970s, usually applied to people who frittered away their income on expensive liquor or drugs: “It’s God’s way of telling you you’re making too much money.” That’s what we used to say at Occidental College, anyway.
ANDREW FERGUSON
