“Good morning, everyone!” said the perky woman at the front of the room.
“Guhmmmng,” came the desultory reply from the rows of blank-faced parents and teenagers in front of her.
Nope. Not good enough. With a glint of steel in her bright voice, the admissions officer repeated: “Good morning!”
Through a hundred heads went the sudden thought that it might be unwise to seem to lack zeal. No one was taking attendance on this ivy-leaved New England campus and it was only an informational meeting, open to anyone curious about the place, but still. Was it worth the risk?
So the people sat up a little straighter and cried obediently, “Good morning!”
“That’s better,” said the woman. Having put things in their proper order, she proceeded with her presentation. She was here to tell potential applicants and their parents about the university, an institution considerably older than the United States that is populated by famous professors and situated on a magnificent and storied campus.
Meetings of this sort, along with campus tours led by cheerful undergrads, take place virtually every day of the year on college and university campuses, but if you haven’t begun the long trip down higher education’s alimentary canal, you’d never know it.
There’s nothing that obviously identifies the roving bands of aspirational high schoolers and their families who crisscross the country each summer to find the right college “fit.”
But when scores of them are packed in a lecture hall and more than a few hands go up when the admissions officer asks who has already visited more than 10 colleges, well, then you get a sense of the magnitude of it all. On this day, hopefuls had traveled from, among other places, Kansas, Virginia, California, Michigan, Maryland, Italy and Hong Kong.
There was, in the crowd, a kind of multilayered yearning.
Among the young students was the great ache for acceptance, the desire to be belong to this extraordinary place, and to enjoy by extension its fame and prestige.
“Is it true that we throw all our applications down the stairs, and only consider the ones that land faceup?”
Laughter ran through the room and the admissions officer answered her own question: “No, of course not. We look at every application. And we can get as many as 25,000 applications in a year.”
If such a thing as a triple ache exists, the parents were in the grip of it: The hope-soaked yearning for their child’s advancement; the low gutache of worrying how to pay for it; and the suppressed awareness that even the brightest children do not always get places. Those odds! That torrent of applications for fewer than 2,000 slots! Ow.
As the presentation ended and families filed outside for a campus tour, someone’s younger sister piped up.
“If there are bunk beds here, and she can get the top bunk,” the girl said, “She should definitely go here.”
The adults around her smiled. If only it were that simple.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
