<p>MusicMom (Post #5): picking a school because it is pretty? Who does that? Oh … wait … I did, back in 1975. As a junior I tagged along on my senior cousin’s college tour of DC schools. When I was a senior, I did a “tour” of Boston schools by sitting in my uncle’s car, driving up Comm Ave, passing by BU and thinking it was terrifyingly large (through the eyes of a kid from a relatively small town), and then arriving at BC with its protective gates, green grass, shiny white stone buildings, blue sky. In hindsight, as a Jewish kid I definitely should have gone for the large over the pretty, but what did I know? I have no memory of us even getting out of the car, let alone taking an official campus tour. Maybe we did, but zero recollection all these years later. My other choices were equally random. My guidance counselor was a BC alum and he pitched the heck out of the place. I wrote an essay which (having found it a few years ago) today probably wouldn’t get me admitted to a community college. I ended up at BC (and eventually at a top 10 law school). Could I have done much, much worse? Of course. But was this a smart way to pick a college? Absolutely not. When I tell our kids these stories, they just look at me in a combo of horror and awe. I’m wondering tho if maybe there isn’t a happy medium between what we used to do in the old days, and what we all do with/for our kids today.</p>