College Visits

It can't actually be time for my daughter to start college visiting. It was just a few weeks ago I was in college myself. Moments from that time are as vivid as if they just happened. Clearly, there is a hole in the time-space continuum. When I picture Beatrix at a college, this is what I picture:

And yet here we are. We visited Carleton yesterday and Macalester the week before (to my great surprise, Mac, which has been Beatrix's dream school since she knew what college was has almost fallen off the list, while she liked Carleton). Her college counselor at school got assigned to her on Friday. We're off and running!

Beatrix is kind of a mini-me, and is looking at a double Theater/English major (with maybe  concentration on race relations thrown in). She wants a small, liberal arts school, and she would prefer that it's not in the center of a huge city (so places like NYU and PACE or even BU are likely out, but Tufts or American University or Temple or Emerson might be possible.) At the same time she does not *have* to be in a city in the same way I wanted to, so we're looking at places like the aforementioned Carleton, and maybe Bennington, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, etc. Her top choice right now, though we have not properly toured it, is Tulane.

She would probably be eligible for a state school for relatively little tuition, due to the North Star Promise, but I think most of those places are too big for her. So we're having a lot of family discussions about colleges to visit, and I'm glad we have a little extra time to do so.

I'm kind of amazed as I look at schools online. On one hand, there are so many more kinds of majors now than there were when I went to college (when dinosaurs walked the earth). My friend Jennifer's daughter is thinking of majoring in sports management (she would be so great!), and I am geeking out about majors like Culture & Politics, Disability Studies, Global Medieval Studies, Jewish Civilization, Origins of Cities, and more. At the same time, I'm disheartened by how many schools have dropped a theater major (meaning that, if she were to stay in state, Saint Thomas, St. Kate's, St. John's, St. Ben's — all of whom have dropped the major — are not options).

We're also discussing such truly fun issues as cumulative GPA, so it's not all perfect family bonding over here...

Beatrix's year (class of 2026) is apparently referred to by schools as "the cliff" — the year that birth rates drop precipitously, and we're trying to work out what that means as well.

And this has me in general thinking a lot about education and about learning, deep in nostalgia (I even dug out some old pictures from living in London this afternoon — why did I take so many pics of places and not so many of people?), and both excited and nervous about what the next steps might be.