The Search is Over

Reflections on seeing the admissions process from the parent perspective for the first time

this tiny infant baby is going to college?!

I got my first job in a college admissions office in 1996. I was a freshman in college and signed up to lead campus tours and to work in a little cubicle, stuffing envelopes and stuffing folders. Over the next few years, I rose through the student worker ranks until I was the lead student worker, responsible for calling prospective students (to offer them the chance to talk to a current student and get a student perspective on any questions they had about campus) and helping with big events on campus. When I graduated, becoming an admissions counselor was my dream job. Within a few months, I’d landed a position with the flagship land grant university in my home state.

Man, I loved being an admissions counselor and I was GOOD at it. I spent years driving and flying around the country, visiting high schools, standing for hours at a booth for college fair after college fair, and giving so many presentations about the value of going to college and how to apply for financial aid and why students should live on campus.

Back on campus, I would also help with new student orientation, including leading sessions for parents about the “importance of letting go”.

I was a single 23 year old with not so much as a houseplant I was responsible for keeping alive, so obviously I was super well qualified to tell an auditorium full of parents how they should be feeling as they prepared to say goodbye to their kid for the first time.

Let me just tell you that I have definitely been feeling some karmic retribution for that hubris lately as I deal with my own big feelings about my son getting ready to leave for college this fall. Letting go turns out to be a lot harder than my 23 year old self could have imagined.

Current emotional energy

While my tenure as an admissions counselor only last a few years¹, I’ve stayed in higher ed for the last 25 years, with most of my career focused on jobs that relate to college admissions and access, including overseeing admissions offices and leading enrollment management work.

Basically, I’ve spent over two decades trying to help prospective college find their way to the college or university that might be the right fit for them. Given all of this, when my son started his senior year last fall, I was excited, confident, and curious about what it would be like to be on the other side of the college admissions process this time around.

We’ve hit May now and my son’s search is over. He’s chosen a school, sent in his deposit, and is all signed up for housing and new student orientation. He’s actually finished with his admissions process since early spring, so I’ve had a little time to reflect on what I got right about his college search, the things that surprised me, and some of the lessons I learned a long the way.

It turns out that even if you are an actual expert on higher education, you should never discount the ability of a 17 year old to surprise you!

What I got right

Last summer, I made the following predictions to my husband:

• Our son would probably apply to no more than eight schools, and would more likely be at six or less

• He’d get accepted to all the schools he applied to, even if he wouldn’t let me review his admissions essay

• While he would apply to at least one school in our city, he would end up going away to school

• He wouldn’t qualify for any of our state financial aid programs or any of the federal need based aid, so we were going to have to talk openly as a family about student loans, how much money we could contribute, and that he’d need to contribute to the cost of his education too.

When all was said and done, I was right about all of the above. He ended up applying (and being accepted to) six schools: two that are out-of-state, two that are in our city, and two that are in-state but a few hours away.

I felt confident that he’d be accepted at all of his chosen schools because I knew he wasn’t interested in attending a highly rejective school. The schools he applied to range from around a 55% acceptance rate to a 99% acceptance rate² and I would have been proud to have him end up at any one of them.

I was also pretty sure that academic or prestige factors weren’t likely to drive his decision making process. Things like average class size, ranking lists, job placement or grad school acceptance rates for graduates, or the pedigrees of his future professors simply didn’t factor in for him. He was pleasantly pragmatic about his future, telling me the drive back from one of our campus visits, “Mom, I want to be a high school math teacher at a public high school… I don’t think I’m gonna have a hard time finding a job, no matter where I go, so I’m more thinking about how much I’ll have to take out in student loans”.

Did I feel some maternal pride in the fact that my kid had clearly absorbed my years of ranting about the stupidity of college ranking lists? Yes. Yes, I did.

I was also right that campus visits would be an important part of the process, especially the debriefing in the car on the way home. Even though he’s my kid and has basically grown up on college campuses, it was still really helpful for him to spend time on the campuses he was interested in. Campus visits both solidified the schools he was most interested in (his two top choices ended up being the two schools he’s visited multiple times) and helped eliminate at least one school (that looked great on paper) from his application list. I ended up being glad that we started doing campus visits on the earlier side (10th grade) and that I made him visit schools that were a variety of sizes and location types. He ended up being a lot more open to smaller and less urban schools than he originally thought he would be; visiting some schools that were farther away from home also made him realize that while he wanted to go away to school, he didn’t want to be on the other side of the country³.

What I got wrong

Well… the biggest thing I got wrong was where he’d actually end up! If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said I was 95% sure I’d end up with another University of Kansas Jayhawk in my house. KU checked all the boxes on his wish list: Away from home but not too far, a big public school with a fun sports culture, a beautiful campus in a great college town, plus the bonus of being closer to our extended family and a decent scholarship program for out-of-state students that would have made the price comparable to the cost at our in-state flagship institution.

KU did end up being one of the schools he applied to, so I was at least right about that. While I did accurately predict four of the six schools he’d end up applying to, his final choice school wasn’t one of them.

Yep. He’s going to a school that I didn’t even have on my radar as an option for him.

So, how’d that happen? In a word: soccer.

A few years ago, I was chatting about college stuff with some other soccer parents in the bleachers and shared that I felt like my son’s vision for college either involved playing on the soccer team or being shirtless on a jumbotron with a letter painted on his chest at a university sports event, cheering like a madman.

Given that my son started high school as an undersized member of his school’s lowest level soccer team with no club soccer experience, the whole “shirtless on the jumbotron” scenario seemed a lot more likely. But the kid who started 9th grade at 5’3 and 100 pounds is graduating at 5’10 with about 50 pounds more muscle that came from working his ass off to become a varsity starter by his senior year.

While we knew that he wasn’t going to be a D1 prospect, it turns out that soccer did end up being more of an option than I expected. He ended up getting multiple offers, from D3 and community colleges, and ultimately chose the school that had the soccer coach and program that he liked the best.

In the interest of my son’s privacy, I’m going to decline to disclose where he’s going to attend, but it’s a small university in a small town and a very different campus experience than I would have thought he wanted.

I didn’t expect that one variable (the ability to continue his soccer career) would override all the other things he had on his wish list, but it’s a good reminder that college decisions aren’t always made based on logic or a careful weighting of all the variables. When it comes to choosing a college, sometimes the heart just wants what the heart wants, even if it doesn’t make the most sense on paper.

Things that surprised me

Even with all my years in higher education, there were still a few things that surprised me while I was navigating the admissions process as a parent.

On the negative side, I was unpleasantly surprised at how unethical some schools were when it came to the athletic recruitment process for D3 schools. I was disappointed in schools that misrepresented how many roster spots they had available and how likely it would be that first year students would get any playing time (when a school is running a soccer roster with nearly 50 players on it, why are they sending kids emails saying they still have “two spots we need to fill”?); I knew that smaller schools often use athletics as a recruitment strategy, but it was still frustrating sometimes to try to figure out which schools were legit interested in my son as a player and which schools were just looking for another warm body to increase their enrollment numbers.

On the positive side, I was pleasantly surprised that my son ended up being offered more institutional financial aid than I expected. Because my son only applied to public institutions (that don’t really engage in a lot of tuition discounting), my expectations were pretty low for what he would be offered from our in-state schools. He ended up being offered merit scholarships from five of his six schools⁴ and his most robust aid offer came from one of our regional public universities.

(Can I say, once again, that I think regional public colleges and universities are often the unsung heroes of higher education? They educate the bulk of students in many states, often at a lower cost, and can be a great fit for kids looking for smaller or medium sized campus option.)

My son will still likely graduate with student loans, but I’m feeling pleasantly surprised that it might end up being less than we were expecting.

My biggest surprise, however, is how emotional I found this whole process. I’ve assumed for most of my son’s life that college (of some kind) was in his future. I know all the data about how beneficial going to college is and how much student’s generally value their experience, including living on campus. I remember how excited I was to go away to school (and I went much further away than my son is going) and how ready I felt by the end of my senior year to get this show on the road.

And yet, and yet.

I’m excited for my son, I really am. He may have chosen a school that wasn’t on my radar and that might not have been the school I would have chosen for him (though I think it is a fine school and I think he’ll get a great education there), but I’m happy for him. Really. It’s just that move-in day is in just over 100 days and thinking about it kind of makes me want to cry.

It turns out that this is the most bittersweet stage of parenting I’ve experienced so far and loving higher ed doesn’t actually make the prospect of missing my son feel any easier.

Here’s hoping there isn’t a 23 year old waiting on campus to give me a pep talk about the importance of letting go…

1. The conventional wisdom (that turned out to be true in my case) was that most admissions counselors fell into one of two categories: lifers or people who lasted 2-4 years. Sometimes it was the travel that burned people out. More often it was the shockingly low pay, I suspect. A handful, like me, were lucky enough to be able to be able to advance up the org chart and stay in higher ed.

2. He applied to one community college, which by design offer basically open access for admissions.

3. Yay! I’m not mad about this.

4. The only school that didn’t offer him any aid was the community college, which is what I expected. Their scholarship options are usually reserved for students who have higher levels of financial need and I support that.