Oh wait, I have forgotten it because it didn’t happen. Not sure there was such a thing for late baby boomers. Maybe my friends went on college tours and didn’t tell me, which is possible. There was a lot of stuff they didn’t tell me. Or maybe it was an East Coast thing.

Of the three Washington colleges I applied to, I’d been to two. But even those visits were coincidental to trying them out as a prospective student.

And one was more damaging than helpful. I picked the second-worst dorm at the University of Washington because a guy I knew was staying there. At least I didn’t pick the worst dorm like the student from Wyoming who signed up for it sight unseen because it had the same name as a town in his home state – Lander.

A few friends applying to one state university known for its stimulating social scene did visit that school for a weekend. When they got back they could only talk about the school’s stimulating social scene and how they’d already enrolled.

There were no guided tours, no meetings with admissions officers, no discussions of programs and housing and computer facilities. The kids I knew who were college-bound got some brochures from the counselor and sent off some applications. If we were accepted, we went.

It seems to have worked out because most of us have jobs – if you count work-release.

I say this as a long preface for a description of how I spent my summer vacation – taking two soon-to-be high school seniors on a tour of colleges in California. Apparently, such things have become a requirement on the list of parental duties somewhere in between diaper changing and chaperoning grad night.

They’d already been to a few colleges here and in Oregon. The theory behind a California trip in summer is that there are a lot of schools there to look at and it can feel like a real vacation, even when it isn’t.

The colleges have set up little industries to deal with the influx. Admissions officers now must read hundreds of essays as well as give presentations about how to write hundreds of essays. College students get jobs as tour guides for overly interested parents and seemingly disinterested students.

Some colleges are more eager than others, depending on their rankings and desirability. American colleges are now measured in large part by how many applicants they reject and how many of those offered enrollment actually attend. Their place in the pecking order is determined more by how many students they don’t educate than by how many they do. If they didn’t admit any students they’d top all the rankings except best party school.

At the University of California Santa Cruz, two women in the visitors center were in competition to see who could give us more brochures and more reasons for attending. I think they work on commission.

At Berkeley, the guide mingled her praise for the school with her doubts that any of us could survive the hyper-competitive admissions process. (We later learned that while the bell tower at Cal is taller, the tower at Stanford is wider).

I think the tours would be different if there were no parents along. We tended to dominate the questions with stuff about academics and safety. Like after the guide at Claremont McKenna proudly pointed out to the parents the drug- and alcohol-free dorm.

“So what goes on in the other dorms, then?” one parent asked. After much stammering about how some students do drink and that ID is required at events where alcohol is available and how no bottles are allowed outside and how free rides are available, she gave us this statistic: Claremont McKenna has the lowest incidence of alcohol poisoning of the five colleges in the Claremont group.

Which is one comparison I didn’t see in The Princeton Review.

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com