College quandary</p>
<p>By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist | April 19, 2006</p>
<p>There is nothing left but the choosing.</p>
<p>No more information sessions with anxious parents asking college administrators overwrought questions about campus security, dormitory sprinklers, and library hours while mortified high school seniors sink ever lower into their seats.</p>
<p>No more student panels stacked with representatives from the soccer team, multicultural club, and modern dance troupe reassuring us that, while drugs and alcohol are common at every college, there is absolutely nothing to rumors that this particular school ''is the weed-smoking capital of the United States."</p>
<p>There are some things my son, Patrick, still does not know about college – the small matter of which one he will attend in the fall, for instance – but there is a lot he has learned from perhaps one too many campus tours this spring.</p>
<p>Collegians lounging on the quad, any quad, or throwing Frisbees on the lawn, any lawn, do not ''look like America," despite the insistent claims to the contrary. They don’t even look like the kids in the college brochures.</p>
<p>With tuition and fees above $40,000 a year at many elite private colleges and nearing $20,000 at well-regarded state schools, ''diversity" better describes the proportion of polo shirts to Birkenstocks than it does the mix of race and class.</p>
<p>He now knows that every world class university has at least one neuroscience student poised to publish a groundbreaking research paper with a Nobel laureate who gets his greatest satisfaction teaching undergraduates, especially freshmen. Really.</p>
<p>He knows, too, that every small liberal arts college has at least one music (or studio art or Russian literature) major who was so inspired by her anthropology professor that she spent her spring break on an archeological dig and unearthed an uncharted Mayan temple. Really.</p>
<p>No wonder it is so difficult to choose.</p>
<p>My son insists he is getting closer to his selection, but it is hard to see quite how. He knows he does not want to enroll anywhere that would require him to take a plane home for the holidays.</p>
<p>I guess that rules out the colleges in Oregon, Ohio, Minnesota, Colorado, Tennessee, and Georgia to which he applied, at no small expense, with what I am certain was a pretty good grasp of their proximity to Massachusetts.</p>
<p>I say ''I guess" because he has a pal who is still weighing her admission to several colleges in the South while insisting that she intends to join the college ski team.</p>
<p>This, clearly, is not a rational process.</p>
<p>One school in the Midwest is low on my son’s list because it is ''in the middle of nowhere," a precise description of the location of the college in northern New England that is high on his list.</p>
<p>One college slipped lower when its costumed mascot waved him through the gate during the school’s open house. Lame. Another college soared higher when he learned that covered walkways would spare him trudging through the snow to class. Cool.</p>
<p>Two colleges are off the list entirely, apparently because they had the bad judgment to offer him scholarships and send him solicitous letters urging him to enroll.</p>
<p>What did Groucho Marx say about wanting nothing to do with any club that would have him as a member?</p>
<p>I would be envious of parents whose decisive offspring chose a college and accepted an Early Decision admission last December when my son was still trying to write an essay and negotiatethe questions on the Common Application.</p>
<p>But then I remember the young woman who discovered a few years ago that the college outside the cornfield in upstate New York was farther from the Metropolitan Museum of Art than she had appreciated those many months before. The college did not move; the collegian just changed her mind.</p>
<p>My son needs only to make up his.</p>
<p>There are 12 days until the May 1 deadline.</p>
<p>What’s the rush?</p>
<p>Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at <a href="mailto:mcnamara@globe.com">mcnamara@globe.com</a>.