The other day, my husband, my daughter — a junior in high school — and I attended an event in our city hosted by what I'll call, in their own words, a "highly selective college." The ballroom was full. Other parents, other juniors, all of us turned up to hear the head of admissions deliver his talk.
He walked us through the hierarchy: what it means to be selective, very selective, and highly selective — and confirmed, based on the number of applications they turn away each year, that they sit firmly in that last category: highly selective. Not quite Ivy League, but much desired all the same. It was, genuinely, a very good talk. Polished, warm, persuasive.
And it was persuasive enough that I didn't think to question, at the time, why a room full of intelligent adults had given up a weekend afternoon to be courted by someone whose entire job was to make us want something we couldn't be sure we could have.
As the talk wound down, I — having finished a rather large coffee not long before — slipped out to the bathroom the moment he said thank you.
The College Stampede
I was gone perhaps two minutes.
When I came back into the ballroom, I found my husband and daughter standing at the back of a very long line, looking distinctly forlorn. I asked them what on earth they were doing. They explained that the instant the speech ended, the room had — there is no better word to describe this — surged. Parents and students had pressed past one another to line up for a quick moment with the all-important head of admissions.
We did the math. At the rate it was moving, we were looking at the better part of an hour — and we were starting from the back, behind a great many desperate parents (and maybe a few students?). And at the end of that hour, what exactly would we say? To be remembered — genuinely remembered, weeks later, back at his office, among the thousands of families he meets — we would have had to do something either outstanding or faintly outrageous. I had nothing outstanding prepared. My daughter, mercifully, had nothing outrageous in mind.
So we made a decision. We had three other children at home waiting for dinner, and we had a dawning sense of the absurdity of the thing. We left.
And somewhere over the following week, the whole afternoon kept turning over in my mind.
Who Is Courting Whom?
And here is what struck me: Given what these colleges cost — given the genuinely staggering sums families hand over — shouldn't this whole encounter run the other way around? Shouldn't it be the family standing at the front of the room? "Here are her grades, here are her talents, here is the kind of person she is, and here is roughly what we are able — and willing — to pay. Start the bidding, colleges."
Instead, the buyers spent their evening lining up to court the seller. We chase the colleges. We all but beg them to accept our hard-earned money — and, arguably, to overpay for our children's education. Something, somewhere, has quietly gone upside down.
The Emperor in the Room
It reminded me of the story of the emperor's new clothes. Two swindlers promise the emperor a suit of clothes so fine it is invisible to anyone unfit for their post. There is, of course, no suit. But no one — not the ministers, not the courtiers, not the crowds lining the street — dares to say so, because no one wants to be the fool who admits they can't see anything. So they all applaud as the emperor proudly prances around in his invisible "clothes." They all tell him he looks magnificent. And the emperor parades through the town with nothing on at all, while everyone privately suspects the truth and publicly performs the opposite — too scared to be the one person to speak out against the crowd. Of course it takes a child to shout out that the emperor is naked — and the whole thing comes crashing down in a great wave of embarrassment at having been swindled out of a fortune for nothing.
Now, I am not suggesting we are getting nothing for our money. But what I find telling about that story is that it isn't really about the swindlers. It's about the crowd.
It's about how a whole town can look directly at something absurd and, out of fear of being the odd one out, agree not to mention it.
Why Do We Keep Lining Up?
I don't think the colleges are necessarily villains — although I do think some of the fees are outrageous. When I tell my friends and family back home what people pay for college here, they are mostly astounded. But I think the more uncomfortable question is about us — the ones standing in line. Why do we line up so eagerly? Why did a room full of grown adults sprint across a ballroom? It isn't stupidity. It's fear: the fear that everyone else is doing something for their child that we are not, the fear of being the family that didn't try hard enough, the fear of saying out loud that the emperor might be underdressed — that maybe we are the idiots for chasing them.
I left that afternoon without my hour in line, and I've decided I'm at peace with it. My daughter will apply where she applies. She will end up where she ends up, and she will be alright — because who she is was never going to be decided by how fast we could sprint across a ballroom and beg someone for a couple of minutes of their attention.
But I do keep wondering about the rest of the room. Not whether we're being conned, exactly. More this:
How many of us, standing in that line, privately suspected the whole performance was a little ridiculous — and lined up anyway, because no one wanted to be the first to say the emperor might have nothing on?
Published Sept 24, 2026