Nov 1, 2012 4 min read

Some high school seniors just know where they want to go next. Notre Dame kids, for example. When I hear a student has been accepted there, the news comes as a foregone conclusion. Of course she’s going there. She’s been talking about it since Gymboree. That must make the senior year so easy, knowing your college and, more to the point, knowing you probably have the brains and test scores to get in there. In my imagination, those parents sit back and watch it unfold, waiting for that delicious moment when the letter arrives and they can finally tell everybody. If the kid is student enough – or has enough athletic talent – the parents don’t even write much of a check.The rest of us have a different kind of senior year, one that has a troublesome but enticing question mark hanging over it. What’ll it be, son? Cooper will be in college this time next year. The question is, where? He wants to study communications and television production and videography. At least we know that part. He even knows what kind of video and editing equipment he’s looking for in a college program. When we set out on our quest, I stupidly thought it would be easy. He’d choose the school with the latest technology and the most credentialed faculty. Well, welcome to the new century, Mom. All the good or decent communications schools have state-of-the art video and editing equipment. So now what?That’s what the college tour is for, the day of walking through campuses leafy and elbow-patchy, or urban and noisy, trying to place your kid in this setting. Just try, as a parent, to categorize the students. Are they wholesome enough? Are these students on their way to the library? Or to a pub?And is this the sea from which my son will select his wife, the mother of my grandchildren?I’ve been driving myself crazy. Sending a child off to college will feel a bit like parental abdication. I’ll be grabbing a goldfish out of the family bowl, escorting him in a baggie across the state, and then releasing him into a big, strange pond. “You should see the dining hall,” Cooper said after a visit to one university just across the state line. That meal ticket will get him anything he could possibly want. And the dorms? They’re all quads now, no barracks with a single, community loo but four private rooms around a shared bathroom. I’ve always thought families should tour resorts and beach towns and other vacation spots before booking the trip. Two weeks is a long time to spend in a hotel next to the sewage treatment plant. Some things you just can’t know until you are there.That’s why the college visit is so important. Cooper has liked every campus he’s visited; it’s as if stepping out of the car into a new school erases all memory of others and makes this one his favorite. He wants to be no more then four hours from home, but within driving distance of a ski resort. He’ll be close enough for us to reach him in half a day if he needs us, and we won’t be paying for plane flights to Florida, as one of my friends is doing. The last of the applications will go into the mailbox this week. Coop seems pretty relaxed about all of it. But the questions loom.What do you want to do with your life? That one seemed pretty easy for him to answer. Where do you see yourself for the next four years? That one’s not so simple.