The College Rush Begins

My daughter, who just turned 16, is ending her sophomore year of high school.

Because she took the PSAT this year, the college solicitations have begun in earnest and it’s already getting surreal.

My husband works at the University of Pittsburgh, and as such, my daughter is eligible for the Tuition Exchange Program. That means she has a shot at full-ride scholarships at 350-some schools around the country, by virtue of my husband’s job. She still has to apply for and get said scholarships, so the research begins.

We printed out a list of all the schools in the program this weekend. Some schools are being automatically crossed out: men’s colleges, technical colleges, art schools, culinary schools, two-year schools, and (at my daughter’s request) all-women’s colleges. We are excluding religious colleges, not merely because we are unreligious, but also because we don’t want anything assumed about my daughter’s religious or political affiliations based on the name of the school on her resume.

Maybe I’m a worrywart, but, I insisted that the one school in the Arab Emirates be automatically disqualified, too. Who knows what will happen over there in the next few years? Besides, they don’t offer Marine Biology there and she isn’t interested in a degree in Sharia.  They do have one.

After the first pass, we are reviewing which schools have the major she wants, which is any variation of Marine Science. During this process (which I promise is tedious), I am finding out about majors I never knew existed. At Drake University in Iowa, you can major in Magazines, and I’m hoping posing in them has nothing to do with it. At the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, you can get a four-year degree in Martial Arts. At Arizona’s Prescott University, you can major in “Adventure Education,” which according to their information qualifies you to lead educational exhibitions in the outdoors and includes extreme sports. Apparently, Peace Studies is now a four-year major at several schools.

We are looking first at which schools have her major, rather than where they are. We’ll worry about that part once we have our list of possibilities. There are times when I’d love to send my daughter to Alaska, and Alaska Pacific University does look like it has an awesome Marine program, but ultimately I question the logistics.

There are some schools she has heard of which she is interested in, but which are not on the Tuition Exchange Program. In those cases, we’ve explained to her, she’s welcome to pursue those schools if there’s a snowball’s chance in hell she can do as well as free. Who knows, she might end up at Duke or Cornell…but we’d rather not have her come out of school a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Not when I know people with master’s degrees working at Starbucks.

This whole thing has arrived way too soon for me. I’d like to have a few more months to process that we really are looking at colleges, and that soon my daughter won’t live here anymore. I can’t even begin to imagine our daily family life without her. Our relationship is complicated, but I will be sad beyond measure to have her away from us.

Time marches on, though, and therefore I’m up to my armpits in collegiate websites, checklists, and mailers. What I hope does not get lost in all of this is our family’s collective ability to take advantage of the two years we still have with her here, because our family will never be the same once kids start leaving.

I cried at the end of Barack Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope,” because he describes a dream in which his oldest daughter walks across the yard from him and gets older with each step, until she is at the other end of the yard, all grown up. I can relate. It’s less sad when you can’t see it happening day by day. But, as my daughter’s 16^th birthday reminded us a couple weeks ago, it is happening no matter how we wish time would slow down.

I only hope I’m as ready for her adulthood as she is.