It’s time for that annual rite of passage – college tours. Yes, my son – who was in kindergarten when I started writing this column – is now old enough to tour college campuses. This is strange to me because in my day, we didn’t tour any campuses. We just filled out an application for any college we felt would ignore our hideous math scores … oh, wait. Maybe that was just me.
Anyway, things have changed since the bad old days. For one thing, tuition is now approximately equal to the annual spending budget of Greece. And when I say “approximately,” clearly I mean tuition costs more. So it’s important for everyone to get a feel for the campus so we don’t fork over a ginormous check only to find out that our child hates the school and wants to change.
Which may happen anyway, but at least we’ve tried to prepare.
Anyway, college campuses have changed a lot in the 400 years since I was a teenager. For one thing, it appears to me that all campuses are required by law to have at least two Starbucks, Peets or Tullys coffee houses open 24/7 on campus. Heaven forbid today’s students survive on instant coffee and sort-of-hot tap water from the bathroom.
Also? Some campuses allow you to use your dining credits at Starbucks, Peets or Tullys. And that completely explains why, during every tour, the coffee houses had long lines of hyper, wide-awake people and the dining commons were empty.
And you don’t even want to know about the dorms. Oh, please. First of all, when you visit what the tour guides always call “a typical dorm room,” you can tell right away that there’s nothing typical about it. For one thing, there are no clothes on the floor, no empty pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling, the halls don’t smell like unwashed feet and there were no notes from roommates saying, “I borrowed your purple T-shirt,” or “Stop borrowing my clothes, expletive-that-can’t-be-printed-in-a-family-newspaper.”
No, these cough-typical-cough rooms had perfectly made beds, posters with dancing cats and color-coordinated storage chests for clothing. So basically it was like stepping into “The Twilight Zone,” only much, much scarier. Oh, and? Some dorms had private bathrooms. As in, a bathroom that was shared only by the two or three people living in the room.
Now I don’t want to make you lose your lunch, but please close your eyes and picture what a private bathroom shared by three freshman boys will look like at the end of a very long freshman year. Yeah. I’m thinking those bathrooms will require a special Hazmat team for end-of-the-year cleaning.
Of course, on each tour we met other parents of future college freshmen. You could always recognize the parents and not just because every one of us looked old and clutched our chests in horror when the tuition costs were announced. No, it’s because we parents were the only ones asking questions about everything from class size to weather. (To be fair, the weather questions were asked by a mom from Minnesota who seemed very concerned that her son might thaw out if he lived in California. And the teens were too busy to ask questions because they were checking out the college-aged students of the opposite sex, which obviously is a very important part of selecting an institution of higher learning.)
Of course, the tour guides took all that in stride – except one who ended every sentence by trailing off with “so … yeah” and didn’t know where the science or humanities buildings were located but did know of an excellent place to chill between classes. So … yeah. We crossed that campus off the list right away.
And now I can’t wait for spring break, when we get to visit even more campuses. And by “I can’t wait,” clearly I mean, save me now from the hell known as campus tours.
