Collegiality

I can honestly say that I've never spent a moment thinking about what it might be like to drop a child off at college. I still don't know what it's like, but today I got a first taste. It's prospective students day at one of the schools my daughter is considering attending next year. We've split up for the moment, and I'm sitting outside observing the activities fair. These are poorly named things, since there's rarely any sort of activity in them. They usually consist of bunches of people sitting around tables talking to each other, while other people walk around and see what kinds of food (I guess the food is what makes it a fair because there are no rides) is being offered on the tables.

After the activities fair, which was apparently pretty controversial in the way the school selected which activities would be represented, there were the requisite welcoming speeches and panel discussions. One thing I learned from the speeches is that the students here are wonderful and are doing all kinds of amazing things. Thank goodness!

This over the top achieveiness (that's a word, right?) was also well represented among the prospective students. There were so many editor-captain-president-whatevers that the dean of admissions had to stop for a moment to mention that there were plenty of students there that weren't the creme de la creme, being just the creme I suppose. This was quite magnanimous of her. Even with whatever kind of credentials inflation people engage in, you would think there would be a limited number of these paragons of high school accomplishment to be had. It's the Northeastern elitist version of Lake Wobegon, where every child is "above average."

After the speeches, the student panelists displayed similar enthusiasm from a different perspective. I don't mean to seem cynical about this, but the whole thing was pretty predictable, mostly because of the kinds of questions the kids were being asked. "Is it a problem if you want to do thus and such?" "Oh no! The school makes sure you can do as much thus and such as you want. And even if they don't, if you really go for it you can get what you want!" It was like reading a bunch of college application answers out loud. The better questions were more practical and specifically focused, like "how do you get an on-campus job?"

After walking around campus for a while, the prospectives went off to dinner with the currents and the parents who remained went to a Dean's reception, which had a misplaced apostrophe because it was hosted by a number of deans. And guess what the deans spoke about? All the amazing things the students were doing this summer! When she got up to the student who was going to Tunisia because she had been inspired by her intensive semester of Arabic, I'd had enough.

This all sounds more negative than I actually feel. The school is justly proud of its current and prospective students. What I'm negative about is the lack of imagination and originality in the way everything was presented. You'd think it would be hard to talk about all this great stuff and make it totally boring and predictable, but you'd think wrong. Somewhere in my archives (that's what I like to call the boxes in the attic) is a parody of the Wharton admissions speech, which I delivered when I was in the Wharton Follies back in 1980. The only part I remember is the passage, "You are the creme de la creme, the icing on the cake, the butter in the frosting, the raisins in the raisin bran." I've never heard it said better.