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If you are parent to a teenage counting down the years at home, you may know where I stand. In this carpeted hotel salon with darkened chandeliers, a panel of pert representatives from eight exclusive colleges take turns flashing slides at a packed house of high school students and their parents. On the screen, we glimpse a class of bright young faces in a dark-paneled room, the professor's hands raised to choreograph an idea, then a soccer player leaps in gold sunlight, and then a student with furrowed brow holds up a tangle of equipment beside her bespectacled professor - an artifact of their collaborative research in some advanced delineation of DNA. The slides click along, and from the podium we hear about faculty-student ratios, financial aid, distinctive student activities, and a litany of academic excellences. One recruiter gets off a zinger: "Our endownment is approaching a billion dollars." Another brags of campus proximity to New York City: "Our history seminars are regularly taught at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Another extols the virtues of a campus with rural isolation...the self-directed path of inquiry...the student-monitored honor system...technology to die for. Successful graduates have become sound bytes in each college's collective reputation against which our children - should they apply - will be measured. We hear bragged each college's graduate stable: names of actors, writers, senators, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Tonight, my sixteen-year-old daughter is seated among the throng, and I am standing in the back, holding the baby. The room is resonant with hype and hope, and with a sizzling electric fear, for the stakes for everyone are very high. Suddenly, a young man bolts past me for the rear door. Halfway across the carpeted arena, he clutches his throat and vomits in the dark - with a moan and a gurgle his expectations and terror escaping him. He staggers alone, and then slinks away into the lobby. The door closes behind him, and the show goes on.

I follow him out, trying to find someone to help me spread a towel over the mess. In the basement lobby, I rock back and forth to soothe the baby. The young man has disappeared, and I try to remember what he must feel, as I reach back thirty years to my own days of applying for what I hoped would be passage through the doorway of a prestigious college to some vague prophecy of success. I remember how nothing worked out exactly as I planned: Stanford rejected my application, and I attended the University of Oregon for twelve years, earning a Ph.D. in medieval literature. Who could have predicted that? Yet here I am, doing what I want to do. I teach at a college myself (where we brag about our own Rhodes Scholar this year), I do some writing, and I have a wife, a baby, and a sixteen-year-old daughter I love.

The lobby is bright, but no one is there to help. As I return to the dark room, as the door hushes closed behind me, and the speaker's confident voice reaches to envelope me - "We accept one applicant in twelve..." - suddenly I feel a place in my mind for a message different from the articulate brag I am hearing. It is a place for the mystery of learning, not mere excellence of achievement. I long for the recognition of the treasure of a young life, not a test for intellectual sufficiency in an applicant. I want for my daughter not college per se, not excellence or competition or "Your Future at Our School," but some acknowledgment of the brief, rich drama of this particular handful of years in a young person's life. Who will speak to that?

In the darkness before me I try to find my daughter's head among the grid of silhouettes against the screen. I can't pick her out. The slides go on, and the voice of yet another admission recruiter proclaims her college's virtues: "Our college consistently produces students who are..." (and a list of characteristics follows). "Consistently"? "Produces"? Is this a factory of the intellect? I find myself staring into the darkened rows of listeners before me and trying to send a message to my girl who will soon be gone from home. I want someone at the podium to step aside from loyalty to a college, and be loyal instead to my child, loyal to the drama of her journey. I want someone to accompany her with words something like this:

Let's say you are on your way to my college - and we are that lucky. The morning has come, and you have packed a big suitcase. You look around the room at the things you will leave - a tattered first book, an animal with a name, a dried corsage, and that window where all your mornings came to wake you. The leaves outside shiver once, then hold steady.

By the front door you say good-bye to your parents. The moment you turn away - there or at some station or airport - you feel it in your bones: never again to meet on these terms. You have walked out of one life and into another. You are afraid, and excited - on your way.

From there to here - from home to a college campus - you experience an accelerated beginning into a future that belongs only to you. You know direction like a river knows it, urgent and inevitable. When you arrive on campus, everything courts you feverishly - people and ideas you have never met, lovers sweet and cruel, great books, alcohol, intoxicating subjects, despair, joy, good friends, professors eager to recruit you to their cause. You are alone, and in wonderful company, and then alone, and in dangerous company, and then alone again. How to sort it out? Late some night you stare at a book you cannot understand for all your trying, and you feel you can't prevail. The light in your room shines on everything, but illuminates nothing. Your mind falters, your spirit withers. And that night, empowered by your parents' gifts, your years in school, and the secret virtues of your character, you have no choice but to go on.

Some power that is in you now will help you then.

No college can anticipate fully what treasures you may bring to their community. We can only guess. Your application and our admission process is a guess - a good guess, probably, but a mysterious path, finally. For the treasure of who you are does belong somewhere. Maybe is it with my college, or one of the colleges represented here. Maybe with another. And maybe with none. Colleges like to think they have the power to "produce" great graduates, like factories of character. But we can't do that. Your high school, for all its virtues, could not create you, only accompany you on a part of your journey, and we are similar. With luck, we can be a place where good faculty, enriching traditions, and a sequence of unpredictable moments of deep learning may give you courage - may invite you to grow from the unique life you bring to our ground toward something neither you nor I can now imagine.

If you apply and we don't accept you, no one has failed. If we accept you and we don't turn out to be the best place for you, no one has failed. The real thing is you - your life of learning that can be nourished, redirected, but never stopped. This life belongs to you. We can only promise gifts of our own to meet the gifts you bring. You may share with us a part in this very old story: you the magic traveler, and we the castle with the open door. You can bring us life.

My eyes come back to focus on the screen: snowy mountains behind a college dorm. One of the Claremont schools. A list of successful graduates, their achievements. My wife has lifted the baby from my arms, and carried him away. The young man has returned, apparently recovered, alert and ready. He hesitates at the door to get his bearings, then strides forward. Somewhere in the dark, my daughter is keeping her soul alive in a busy world. I do not know what she will do. She does not know. And no college can know. This path of not knowing - yet, this is what college is for.

Standing in the dark, I give up my treasure to this mystery.

	OPEN FORUM: College Recruitment Night By Kim Stafford Journal of College Admission Spring/Summer 1999


	If you are parent to a teenage counting down the years at home, you may know where I stand. In this carpeted hotel salon with darkened chandeliers, a panel of pert representatives from eight exclusive colleges take turns flashing slides at a packed house of high school students and their parents. On the screen, we glimpse a class of bright young faces in a dark-paneled room, the professor's hands raised to choreograph an idea, then a soccer player leaps in gold sunlight, and then a student with furrowed brow holds up a tangle of equipment beside her bespectacled professor - an artifact of their collaborative research in some advanced delineation of DNA. The slides click along, and from the podium we hear about faculty-student ratios, financial aid, distinctive student activities, and a litany of academic excellences. One recruiter gets off a zinger: "Our endownment is approaching a billion dollars." Another brags of campus proximity to New York City: "Our history seminars are regularly taught at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Another extols the virtues of a campus with rural isolation...the self-directed path of inquiry...the student-monitored honor system...technology to die for. Successful graduates have become sound bytes in each college's collective reputation against which our children - should they apply - will be measured. We hear bragged each college's graduate stable: names of actors, writers, senators, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Tonight, my sixteen-year-old daughter is seated among the throng, and I am standing in the back, holding the baby. The room is resonant with hype and hope, and with a sizzling electric fear, for the stakes for everyone are very high. Suddenly, a young man bolts past me for the rear door. Halfway across the carpeted arena, he clutches his throat and vomits in the dark - with a moan and a gurgle his expectations and terror escaping him. He staggers alone, and then slinks away into the lobby. The door closes behind him, and the show goes on. I follow him out, trying to find someone to help me spread a towel over the mess. In the basement lobby, I rock back and forth to soothe the baby. The young man has disappeared, and I try to remember what he must feel, as I reach back thirty years to my own days of applying for what I hoped would be passage through the doorway of a prestigious college to some vague prophecy of success. I remember how nothing worked out exactly as I planned: Stanford rejected my application, and I attended the University of Oregon for twelve years, earning a Ph.D. in medieval literature. Who could have predicted that? Yet here I am, doing what I want to do. I teach at a college myself (where we brag about our own Rhodes Scholar this year), I do some writing, and I have a wife, a baby, and a sixteen-year-old daughter I love. The lobby is bright, but no one is there to help. As I return to the dark room, as the door hushes closed behind me, and the speaker's confident voice reaches to envelope me - "We accept one applicant in twelve..." - suddenly I feel a place in my mind for a message different from the articulate brag I am hearing. It is a place for the mystery of learning, not mere excellence of achievement. I long for the recognition of the treasure of a young life, not a test for intellectual sufficiency in an applicant. I want for my daughter not college per se, not excellence or competition or "Your Future at Our School," but some acknowledgment of the brief, rich drama of this particular handful of years in a young person's life. Who will speak to that? In the darkness before me I try to find my daughter's head among the grid of silhouettes against the screen. I can't pick her out. The slides go on, and the voice of yet another admission recruiter proclaims her college's virtues: "Our college consistently produces students who are..." (and a list of characteristics follows). "Consistently"? "Produces"? Is this a factory of the intellect? I find myself staring into the darkened rows of listeners before me and trying to send a message to my girl who will soon be gone from home. I want someone at the podium to step aside from loyalty to a college, and be loyal instead to my child, loyal to the drama of her journey. I want someone to accompany her with words something like this: Let's say you are on your way to my college - and we are that lucky. The morning has come, and you have packed a big suitcase. You look around the room at the things you will leave - a tattered first book, an animal with a name, a dried corsage, and that window where all your mornings came to wake you. The leaves outside shiver once, then hold steady. By the front door you say good-bye to your parents. The moment you turn away - there or at some station or airport - you feel it in your bones: never again to meet on these terms. You have walked out of one life and into another. You are afraid, and excited - on your way. From there to here - from home to a college campus - you experience an accelerated beginning into a future that belongs only to you. You know direction like a river knows it, urgent and inevitable. When you arrive on campus, everything courts you feverishly - people and ideas you have never met, lovers sweet and cruel, great books, alcohol, intoxicating subjects, despair, joy, good friends, professors eager to recruit you to their cause. You are alone, and in wonderful company, and then alone, and in dangerous company, and then alone again. How to sort it out? Late some night you stare at a book you cannot understand for all your trying, and you feel you can't prevail. The light in your room shines on everything, but illuminates nothing. Your mind falters, your spirit withers. And that night, empowered by your parents' gifts, your years in school, and the secret virtues of your character, you have no choice but to go on. Some power that is in you now will help you then. No college can anticipate fully what treasures you may bring to their community. We can only guess. Your application and our admission process is a guess - a good guess, probably, but a mysterious path, finally. For the treasure of who you are does belong somewhere. Maybe is it with my college, or one of the colleges represented here. Maybe with another. And maybe with none. Colleges like to think they have the power to "produce" great graduates, like factories of character. But we can't do that. Your high school, for all its virtues, could not create you, only accompany you on a part of your journey, and we are similar. With luck, we can be a place where good faculty, enriching traditions, and a sequence of unpredictable moments of deep learning may give you courage - may invite you to grow from the unique life you bring to our ground toward something neither you nor I can now imagine. If you apply and we don't accept you, no one has failed. If we accept you and we don't turn out to be the best place for you, no one has failed. The real thing is you - your life of learning that can be nourished, redirected, but never stopped. This life belongs to you. We can only promise gifts of our own to meet the gifts you bring. You may share with us a part in this very old story: you the magic traveler, and we the castle with the open door. You can bring us life. My eyes come back to focus on the screen: snowy mountains behind a college dorm. One of the Claremont schools. A list of successful graduates, their achievements. My wife has lifted the baby from my arms, and carried him away. The young man has returned, apparently recovered, alert and ready. He hesitates at the door to get his bearings, then strides forward. Somewhere in the dark, my daughter is keeping her soul alive in a busy world. I do not know what she will do. She does not know. And no college can know. This path of not knowing - yet, this is what college is for. Standing in the dark, I give up my treasure to this mystery.