Both Wallpaper and Firewall

My office at Kenyon College is ideal for watching visitors. Unfortunately, my windows cut most people off around the neck so that my every-day view is a parade of student and parent heads, parents taking the lead 90 percent of the time. With furrowed brows, thinning hair and cheeks giving way to gravity's pull, these parents carry the weight of the college selection process in their worried eyes. They want the best for their sons or daughters. They want the best for themselves. After all, the fat envelope is a kind of report card for parenting, isn't it? I wish the answer were a definitive "no."

The college search process is so front-loaded with expectation that even those of us who do this for a living approach it with trepidation. I was a brand new college dean when my oldest daughter, Prospie (who asked that I use an alias in this tellall tale), began her college search. I was delighted when her best friend's mother volunteered to take the two of them to the West Coast. Prospie returned from that trip saying, "I'm not a warm-weather person. I don't really like wearing shorts." Okay, so college choice was, in part, about the wardrobe. This I hadn't anticipated.

I was delighted when another friend's mother volunteered to take her east to look at colleges. Prospie returned from that trip saying, "I don't like that much competition." So college choice was also about the perceived psychic toll anticipated on any given college campus.

With both the East and West Coasts crossed off the list, I now had to face the fact that I had not slithered out from under the responsibility of the college tour. I was going to have to get into the car and take my furrowed brow and my daughter to a few college campuses.

Prospie and I started our tour on an artsy liberal arts campus where we were informed that students were paid a quarter for defecating into a compost toilet. When Prospie heard that this same school had no physical education requirement, she said, "Sign me up." We sat through an information session and then she did her first interview. When we got into the car, she said, "Why aren't you asking any questions?" I informed her that I was a dean undercover. I didn't want to shape her expectations by asking any of the questions I knew to ask ("What is the freshman to sophomore retention rate?" or "How many faculty live within a half hour of campus?"). I wanted this to be her experience entirely, but I knew that she was watching me for clues. It's not easy to impersonate wallpaper, but I was working very hard at it.

We proceeded to what I thought would be the perfect school for her-one with strong international programs in a dynamic small city. We drove for hours across a Midwestern state only to arrive in the middle of a late autumn snowstorm. As we got out of the car, I looked down at Prospie's yellow flip-flops. "Is that all you brought?" She nodded. We did the chilly tour and afterwards, she declared there was no sense of community on campus. I wanted to shout, "You clearly have hypothermia!" but I didn't. I resumed my wallpaper pose.

And so it went. What about this campus? "Too jock-y," she pronounced. And this one? "Too nerdy." Her impressions visceral, her statements superficial, Prospie responded with her gut-which she clearly had good access to-with every stop on the campus tour trail. I admired her decisiveness but worried about how quickly she limited her options.

The parent's role in this whole odyssey is so ill-defined that we end up feeling like something between a taxi driver and a walking checkbook. You are bankrolling the initial journey-the Starbucks stops, as well as the pricey plane tickets-and you'll be responsible for the big ticket at the end, but in the meantime, it's like taking a toddler to buy a car. Let's be honest: When choosing a college, our children don't really know what they're looking for. They have not yet, after all, had to stay up all night to write a treatise on Howard's End, faced the devastation of a biology experiment gone bad nor experienced that epiphonic moment as they delved into another culture. They don't know that the friends they make in college will shape not only their musical tastes, but the lens through which they see the world. And maybe-just maybe-this is all for the better.

Prospie applied to five colleges-all Midwestern, of varied levels of selectivity. I took one look at her essay (no pens allowed!) and asked one question. She actually listened and reshaped the ending... then pushed the Common App buttons to transport all her applications into the various in-boxes of those colleges that didn't get the "too this" or "too that" pronouncement. I sighed a little too loudly as I watched her push the button. "What's wrong?" she asked. I had no answer.

We waited and we watched the mail arrive. The postcards and envelopes that clogged our mailbox remained mostly ignored on the kitchen table. Whenever I handed her a piece of mail during a meal at that table, she just said, "Whatever," and shrugged. All those carefully crafted messages were lost on Prospie. If she only knew how much of my life was spent attending to those messages. But then again, I was reading them-and if I was reading them, so were parents across America. We are the taxi drivers, the financiers, yes, but also the "Consumer Report" for our college searching sons and daughters. What two-year-old knows if she needs anti-lock brakes?