Though I have been helping students with college applications for years, it wasn't until I began the process with my own child that I realized what a miniscule contribution my help with college essays or college recommendations had been. This is a year-long odyssey. I don't know how any teenager could survive it alone.
Maybe I'm wrong here and other 16-year-olds are more industrious and self-motivated than the one I live with. I'm sure there are a few paragons out there who send off for forms, return response cards, sign up for test dates, make plans for campus visits, and generally get on with this complicated process all the while keeping up their grades and playing first violin in the school orchestra. This just doesn't happen to be my experience. What I see is a busy and preoccupied teenager who has every intention of attending a good college and can't imagine that he should be doing anything other than going to school to make that happen.
Over winter break I spent the better part of a morning signing James up for the ACT, SAT, and SAT II exams. I am not a novice to website forms, and it still wasn't easy. Of course James should have been doing this for himself, and family therapists reading this will no doubt point out that I contribute to James' incompetence by doing too much for him, but I wanted this piece of the puzzle done right and I wanted it done now. Mothers of teenage sons know that those two things can be difficult to make happen unless you do the job yourself.
As James is only in eleventh grade, we are still a long way from filling in actual applications, but brochures from small colleges have begun to arrive. Guess who reads them? I am amazed by the quality of the programs and the myriad opportunities for learning. I go out and buy a catalogue of colleges. I try reading from it to James at the dinner table. He tells me to chill out. I point out a gorgeous landscape in the University of Alaska brochure. The headline offers students a chance to get away from the crowd. "But, Mom, I don't want to get away from the crowd." He tosses it.
We do seem to have made progress in terms of narrowing the field. James is clear about not wanting to go to a college that is smaller than his high school. He also says he doesn't want to be out in a cornfield. He's beginning to consider places he has never heard of. He understands what we can afford and what we can't afford though hasn't quite hoisted in how much work applying for scholarships and financial aid will be.
I'm beginning to wonder if high schools shouldn't offer a class during the first semester of senior year specifically devoted to applying for college. How else can teenagers who don't have obsessive mothers manage to get all the pieces of their college applications assembled? It doesn't seem fair that only those who do or those who can afford private college counselors should be the ones getting accepted. Simply urging students to think early about college is never going to be enough. They need to be nagged daily.

Carol Jago teaches English at Santa Monica High School and directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She can be reached at jago@gseis.ucla.edu