And So it Began…
How I learned to be neurotic about college admissions…

On an August morning in 2002, a little self-important bullfrog of a woman told Alek and me that he’d never get into the U, and he better think of some state colleges or community colleges. It was the summer before his senior year of high school at the large, suburban high school he’d attended since tenth grade.

“But, he has a B average,” I countered. “I got into the U with a B+ average, and he’ll have that by the time he’s into his senior year.”

“It’s different now,” the seriousness in her voice proclaiming her position as expert high school guidance counselor. “The U (the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities) looks at class rank and GPA, and kids like Alek don’t get in. His 3.1 puts him at the 50th percentile at Hopkins High. Have you thought of St. Cloud State or Normandale Community College?”

Of course we hadn’t. In my day, during the early seventies, when everyone got into the U, only the kids who weren’t really college material went to those schools. I looked at this woman, her stout little body becoming more frog-like as I processed what she was telling me. As she grew warts and her skin began to turn green, here’s what I heard.

“Your son is stupid and lazy, and you are a lousy parent for letting him get this way.”

Great. I quit my job during his kindergarten year so I could be a sharp, engaged mother. I gave up half our family’s income, and any hope of an advertising executive’s career life, just to end up a lousy parent.

Damn the frog woman. Damn my boy!

The expression, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” should be mother instead of woman. I felt scorned, and someone had to take the resulting punches.

On the way home from that meeting, I was steaming; not talking to Alek, just steaming. He was silent.

At home I took all my anger at having been labeled a lousy parent (at least in my mind) and pacing my kitchen floor, I yelled at Alek. I called him a loser. In a scene punctuated with expletives, I highlighted his missteps as a student for every grade that wasn’t an A, (his ninth grade year was a blow-out.) The counselor was only partly right; he wasn’t stupid I knew, but he was lazy. Lazy people who can’t get into good colleges are losers.

I don’t actually remember his reaction to my tirade. He probably defended himself a little, his 6’4” young adult body trying to stand up to a crazed mother, defending his record, and then resigning himself to my vindictive temper tantrum. I can picture his face, his beautiful blue eyes, so lost and so hurt and feeling that yes, maybe his mother was right, and he was a loser.

God, I wish I had waited until the next day. By then, my mean tempered vitriol had disappeared with the steam that shot out of my head like a cartoon character and I apologized to my boy and began working on fixing the damage I inflicted with my bad mama act. I also arranged to change counselors. Real or not, she made me feel awful, and the new, younger male counselor assigned to us worked to build us back up.

But that summer meeting was when I discovered several things that have for better or for worse created my generally surreal vision of parenting teenagers in preparation for college:
First, students should just get straight A’s if they want full credit for their innate intelligence assuming they have it, and second, students who are willing to play the role of super achiever get all the opportunities.

For parents, don’t ever, ever, let your nag-and-push guard down because this business of planning for college is crazy and one missed step might mean the difference between your kid having a good future or not.

Finally, don’t believe the previous statements unless you’re willing to swim in the tsunami waters of a culture that claims getting into a selective college takes precedence over childhood.
But maybe you won’t recognize the tsunami for what it is anymore than I did.

To prepare you though, here are a couple of statistics from the U.S. Department of Education. In 1972, around the time my husband and I graduated, three million students nationwide graduated from high school. In 2005, just about the same number of students graduated (3.089 million). But now a whopping 62 percent more grads are enrolling in colleges, with another 15 percent growth expected by 2014!

How many of us look at admissions stats at colleges and questionwhether we’d have been accepted today? The answer is many of us would not. No wonder then that our generation, we uber parents who have more than any generation engaged in micro-managing our kids, is going ballistic.

Things are different now.