The college visit - playing the hard sell, then making you beg to be accepted.

The Most Important Life Decision You'll Ever Make (or so they tell you)

It's Spring Break of the high school junior year, and as sure as the daffodils are opening their blooms to the sun, seventeen year-olds are opening their minds to the possibility of attending college.

This week we took Sara to visit various halls of higher education around New England. Fortunately, New England is geographically small, but chock-a-block full of colleges and universities that cater to every possible academic discipline. Since Sara hasn't even determined if she's going to prom, the expectation she'll start college with a defined major is a stretch. This narrows the criteria for schools to those with pretty campuses and cute boys.

Armed with a list of schools showing websites plastered with photos of groups of smiling students, all in the exact proportion of two blacks, one Asian, and three whites (one being slightly obese), equally split between male and female, and not one photo taken in the bleak northeast mid-winter, we set up a week's worth of campus tours.

Rather than a chronological detailed list of our experiences I have decided to distill all the tour scripts into one, and the tour guide into a senior coed in the home stretch to graduation who took this Admissions Department job for beer money.

"Welcome to Huxley college, actually home of the unoffensive sea cucumber mascot. My name is Tipheny and I'm majoring in neurophysiology with a minor in masking tape."

"Let's begin by traipsing across campus to where we'll see an actual hall." (not a lecture hall, or a dining hall, but hall-WAY)  "This is where actual students actually walk between classes. Behind you is an actual classroom where we learn stuff. If you are an engineering major you'll learn actual engineering stuff, and if you're a science major you'll learn overly complicated stuff." There were no philosophy majors to be seen as they were probably debating the merits of attending classes at all.

Walking outside between buildings our guide made us aware of the tall, blue poles along the walking paths spaced five feet apart, with blue lights atop them.

"These are actually our 'Emergency Safety and Emotional Support' poles. Notice actually how the buttons are covered in felt to feel actually soothing when pushed during an actual heightened state of anxiety. If a student feels unsafe, insecure, or just  needs to confirm that their socks don't clash with their pants, they can push the button and help will instantly appear"

"Next is an actual dorm room. It's comfy (cramped) and you'll be sharing it with an actual roommate". This room was for show only, and was obviously professionally dressed by someone in the real estate business, as it was permeated by the scent of freshly baked cookies and not the smell of teenage sweat.

To take any campus tour today you would think that the most popular major was a degree in eating. Fully half of the tour time was dedicated to visiting the various eateries. It seemed that each building was constructed around a smorgasbord of world cuisine. Students are never more than a few steps from food when that first pang of hunger hits, any time of day or night. As with the rest of our "Supersize Me" society, the Freshman 5# has turned into the Freshman 15# because of this. If the colleges of yesteryear were judged on the number of athletic fields, today's schools are ranked by their number of Starbucks, which even here in the land of Dunkin Donuts, has become as ubiquitous on campuses as the school monogrammed hoodie.

Each tour ends in a lecture hall with our tour guide saying how "actually fun it was to meet all of you". This is the time where our group is handed over to the professionals, those young men and women from the admissions office who, if they hadn't taken this job, would be selling used cars. The analogy is quite apt as their goal is to convince your child to see themselves walking the hollowed halls of Huxley, and not the reality of paying for it.

This is about the time where every presentation culminates in the ultimate magic of misdirection - Study Abroad. The last two hours have been a deluge of sales pitches on why YOU need to be HERE or your life will end in Shakespearean style tragedy when suddenly gears are shifted and the message becomes why you DON'T want to be here. Enter "Study Abroad". Get away, see the world, free up our classrooms for more revenue generating students. The race is on to see which University can send you to the most obscure corner of the planet. If Study Abroad were an option when I was a student I would have made it my major because none of the presented photographs showed students doing any real work.

I wish I could day that our interaction with these schools ended with the car ride home, but it didn't. Colleges and universities are the most sophisticated marketers on the planet. Within weeks of starting the school search process our postman told us we needed a larger mailbox. The volume of literature and school swag arriving to our house began to exceed our ability to open it all and we resorted to placing a recycling bin on the porch to streamline the process of disposal. It was at this point that I learned I would happily take the equivalent cost of whatever a school spends on printing and mailing in lieu of financial aid.