There's nothing quite like helping your kid fill out college applications to remind you just how little a series of numbers or checked boxes can tell you about a person's true nature.
These are institutions that want him (i.e., you) to go into debt at the rate of $30,000-50,000 a year, just for him to earn a four-year degree.
As we check off his race, ethnicity, SAT scores, classes he's taken, grades, family income, and on and on, it occurs to me that none of this in any tangible way tells his story.
We are just being reduced to comparatives. And if there is one thing I have learned as a journalist the past 45+ years, never reduce another person to a formula.
(Except, of course, if all you want is to sell that person something.)
I do not know what some admission officer somewhere might think about my son by scanning his application. I'm quite sure he will simply be sorted into one pile or another.
Unless they read his writing, where he reveals a bit of himself and his values, none of this other crap really matters at all.
Testing is broken and always has been. Character matters and always will.
I hope for him that someone in the chain of deciders understands character when it presents itself.
And that the match is a good one for him.
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