Constable: College tours great but no cause for angst
During our spring-break pilgrimage across 1,413 miles, five states and six college campuses, my wife, Cheryl, and I get schooled by our son in how to tell whether the music coming from our car's speakers is performed by Kanye West, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, Phife Dawg or Chance the Rapper.
Will, a junior in high school, gets a glimpse into his educational future.
Unheard of when I was a high school kid, the spring-break, college-visit road trip is a suburban staple in some sectors today. At one of the small, out-of-state liberal arts schools our family visits, a dry-eraser board welcomes our son and kids from Barrington Hills and Batavia. When my wife and I were seniors in high school, we applied to two colleges each - the one where we hoped to go, and a backup in case we didn't get into our first choice. Some of our classmates never even saw their new college home until the day they moved into dorm rooms where they met strangers who would be their roommates.
On our tour with Will, most of the teenagers visiting colleges are juniors in high school. Each passionate guide shows us a dorm room, classrooms and labs, the chapel or auditorium, an old building that looks as if it belongs in Hogwarts with Harry Potter, a new LEED-certified building that boasts solar panels and interesting windows, a state-of-the-art physical fitness center and the redesigned cafeteria where everyone is treated to a lunch with vegan stations, gluten-free options, international cuisine, at least one dish made with kale and good old pizza.
All of this great stuff is offered by colleges that are smaller than our son's high school, and far more expensive.
Some families feel pressure to win acceptance into the best, highest-ranked college on some list. If Forbes or U.S. News & World Report lists your daughter's first choice as the 147th best college, but you think her GPA, test scores and essay could get her into the 113th-ranked college, shouldn't you apply to that school?
Not necessarily. As a wise admission person told one of our older sons worrying about whether he'd choose the right school, "Picking a college isn't the most important decision you'll make in your lifetime."
There are hundreds of ways for a teenager to grow into a smart, capable, secure, well-educated adult. Some get there without attending a college.
Most college students reach that destination without engaging in the sort of "Hunger Games" competition where only the best survive. In a story perfectly headlined, "Shut Up About Harvard," the statistical analysis website FiveThiryEight.com points out that the college-admissions process isn't the jungle we often make it out to be. Fewer than 1 percent of students attend an elite college that accepts fewer than 10 percent of applicants. A meager 4 percent of students attend a college that accepts only 25 percent of applicants. Three-fourths of students end up going to colleges that admit more than half the kids who apply.
And college students aren't all kids, either. About a quarter of the students at traditional four-year colleges are 25 or older.
About half of all college students attend community colleges. Students work and go to college part time. They take gap years. They juggle jobs and student loans.
By the end of our trip across Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, Will says he could see himself at five of the six schools we visit.
That's a better success rate than my wife and I record trying to identify Kanye West songs.
Perhaps that's because we're a little skittish about the title of the debut album that made Kanye famous - "The College Dropout."