Higher Education

As I blogged about not too long ago, our oldest daughter will be heading off to university in about a year-and-a-half (sigh). In preparation for that exciting/excruciating day, we’ve taken her to various college campuses. Last month we took another such journey, which aligned with our daughters’ winter school break.

This latest trip, like most of the others (including last summer), involved motoring way down south from our home in the U.S. northeast. We drove more than 1,600 miles in five days so she could visit campuses in Georgia and South Carolina – right in the dead of winter.

It’s an interesting experience, hopping in the car in February and driving from snow-blanketed New Jersey to the deep South, where the temps were in the mid-60s F (18 C). We could have walked around in shorts down there – if we had packed shorts, which we didn’t, because we were driving out of the cold-ass northeast, and our brains have been wired to believe that everywhere in the world just has to be as cold as the cold-ass northeast.

Our daughters (like their Dad) were born and spent their early years down South, before we packed up and moved to London in early 2018. We’re not exactly strangers to mild Southern winters. But after eight years away, we more or less forgot they existed.

Funny thing: When we first moved to New Jersey from London in 2023, our oldest daughter thought she might like to go to university somewhere nearby, like New York City or thereabouts, so she’d be close enough to get home-cooked meals on a regular basis.

But a series of harsh northern winters have changed her mind. She’ll be southbound when it’s time to head off to college. It could be Maryland, or Virginia. Or it could be North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee or Alabama. But it will be well south of where we live now.

This is not unusual. I spent the first half of my college years at the University of South Carolina in Columbia – maybe the hottest place I’ve ever lived. One of the first things I noticed was that there were a whole shitload of people from the Northeast attending school there. Some of my best friends were from New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. They, too, wanted to escape the harsh winters up north – even as they constantly bitched about pretty much every other aspect of Southern life.

Like them, our daughter will probably be hundreds of miles away in a couple of years. This is both unimaginable and perfectly understandable.

Luckily, we still own a home in North Carolina – the first one my wife and I bought (in 2008), the first house our kids lived in, and one we’ve rented out for more than a dozen years. We’ll be able to split our time between here and there when/if our daughters move south for college, which means they can still grab a home-cooked meal not too terribly far away.

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For the parents, this whole process of visiting different college campuses with our daughter conjured up our own pre-college memories from long ago (my wife’s experience was more recent than mine by about 15 years).

Thinking back on it, I don’t believe I visited a single college campus while in high school. I had a short list of universities I wanted to attend, and had already seen their campuses via other experiences (college football and basketball games; random road trips). I knew where I wanted to go and didn’t give a single thought to investigating other options.

When my first couple of university choices politely declined my applications (sigh), I just went on down the line and chose the first college that said yes. And that was it.

I wasn’t what you’d call a highly motivated student in those days. School was more or less a necessary grind. I knew what I wanted to do for a living – be a writer/journalist – and had already built up plenty of practical experience in the field, working with professionals. College was just something you endured until you got the diploma and bolted.

I entertained thoughts of skipping a year between high school and college so I could hitchhike around the country (that was a thing back then). My dad swatted down that idea, so off to university I went.

I muddled my way through 4.5 years of college, making mostly average grades but excelling in the study of Partying/Rock n’ Roll. On a scale of 1 to 100, I scored about a 73 in terms of the richness and fullness of my college experience. I did some positive things (writing for the student newspaper; getting involved in some literary whatnot; playing intramural sports). But most of my time was spent grinding toward the end.

I could have and probably should have experienced more in college, accomplished more. Or not. Who knows?

What I do know is that I was in a hurry to enter adulthood, where I figured the real wonder of life existed. In that respect, I was an outlier. Plenty of my peers wanted the school daze to last forever. I was the opposite. Some inner voice told me that college was just a brief interlude to something far greater and more magical. The life I have lived since then is a testament to that voice.

I’m blessed and lucky to have collected more than my share of amazing experiences in the years since college. I’ve traveled far and wide, lived like a pauper and a prince, known many fascinating people whose own experiences broadened my worldview in countless ways. Whether they came from the gutter or the penthouse, knowing them opened me up to a whole universe of possibilities.

Over the past quarter-century I’ve lived a life I often dared to dream about but didn’t often dare to believe was attainable.

And frankly, college had nothing to do with it. I can’t think of a single thing I learned or experienced in college that was nearly as important as the things I learned and experienced after I graduated.

I won’t tell our daughters that, of course. I want them to embrace college with eyes wide open. I want their university experiences to be much richer than mine were. But I also want their post-university lives to be at least as rich as mine.

Most of all, I want to ensure they’re properly prepared to spot that life, grab it by the horns, and make it their own. I trust they are.

I’ve read a stat that 80 percent of the time we spend with our kids happens before they turn 18, or at least before they head off to college or some other life. That sounds about right. When they do leave, we’ll have to make do with the 20 percent.

It will be hard to say goodbye. But it will be easy to wish them well, knowing that the real magic lies in front of them.

Image: AI generated, courtesy of my very specific instructions.