When I was a high school senior, my parents gave me a clear choice. I could go to community college for two years, then transfer to UC Berkeley – or I could find richer parents. I went with Option One. I wrote an essay – no idea what on – filled out my forms, and, voila! Done and done. The whole deal probably took an hour, and the total cost of my education, including rent on my South Side apartment, was about five grand.
Those of you with teenagers contemplating college are probably rolling on the floor, either in hysterics or agony, possibly a piquant combination of the two. Getting into college today is a busier business. It combines the stress of big game hunting with the frenzied tedium of a long-haul car trip. There is no One School Option. There are thousands, from which must be sifted hundreds, from which he plucks a possible twenty, then winnows it down to eight or ten. And then you and The Dad look at the bottom line and realize you don’t have enough functional, salable organs between you to cover one semester.
Our kitchen counter is buried beneath shiny view books printed on heavy stock, slick, seductive college porn. Our computer is bookmarked with a panoply of websites, on which our kid can click through Paradise Promised, the cloud-land citadels of high culture where the Life of the Mind couples ecstatically with Boundless Social Interaction. Learn! Grow! Coed Dorms! It’s everything he ever dreamed of – and it’s 50K a year.
There are places in this country where you can get a perfectly good house for 50K. Maybe we should just buy him a house, and let him figure the rest out for himself.
Or we could start a puppy mill. About time that dog started carrying her weight around here. Meth’s pretty easy to make, isn’t it? Do you have to have a trailer? Is it too late to get an MBA? An MLS? Richer parents?
We’re a long way from home on this one, and the road trip has just begun. Already the car smells like gym socks and old banana peels. Somebody’s carsick, somebody has to pee. And there’s no place to pull off for the next six months.
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