<p>My son is a junior. Junior year is the Oh Shit year of high school<em>, </em>as in,<em> Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take the SAT. Oh shit, I’m gonna have to take it again if I score anywhere below 1580. Oh shit, AP Calc is kicking my ass right now.</em> There are plenty more <em>oh shits</em> where that came from, and they all center around that eternal source of angst for many juniors and their parents: college. The second your child is born, the specter of college colonizes your mind: the competition, the choices, and above all, the price. You and I know many parents who have been driven insane, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/private-school-admissions-kindergarten-nursery-school-feeders.html">all too early</a>, by the college issue. They often pass that angst onto their kids, who then pass it onto their kids, and so on and so forth until you have an entire nation of people who will cut themselves if they don’t get into Harvard.</p>
<p>I will not cut myself if my son doesn’t get into Harvard. In fact, we’re not even going to visit Harvard, we’re just that resigned. But there are a great many non-Harvard colleges out there, and we’re out on the road all this week to visit a few of them. Oh yes, it’s the Spring Break college tour. Normally we’d use this vacation to hit the beach, or to visit Busch Gardens in Virginia (so much easier and more affordable than Disney that we went three years in a row), or to stay at home and get on each other’s nerves. But since our son is currently running the academic gantlet, we have to use this week to go on a school crawl. We also have to drag our other son, now 14, along with us. I promised that one we’d go out for soup dumplings as compensation for his time.</p>
<p>First up: a three-hour drive from our home to Faber (I’ll be using fictional college names for this story, so as not to piss off any admissions officers). Faber is a classic small college, located in a one-street town in the middle of nowhere. The place is laid out in classic fashion too, resplendent with clean brick buildings all situated around verdant quad littered with plastic Adirondack chairs. Immediately, I love it. Even at 49, I still get that rah-rah feeling anytime I arrive on any bucolic college campus. I walk around any quad, and my mindset instantly shrinks back down to 17 years old. <em>The guys here look like they could be my buds. Oh wow, their cafeteria makes burgers to order. Teenage me might have had a good time here.</em> For the sake of all, I keep these emotions to myself.</p>