Grace reminded herself that she had resolved not to get sucked into this snakepit of parental competition. Study after study showed that there was no correlation between where a person went to college and his or her future happiness, or even earning power. She knew plenty of people who had underachieved in their youth and had gone on to do great things. And she could cite many examples of the reverse—kids who burned out by the time they got to college or simply couldn’t cope without their parents micromanaging their lives; she had heard of some parents who even called their college kids to wake them up for morning classes. But it was hard to step back when everyone at Harry’s high school, students and parents alike, spoke of little else, and the kids were all jockeying to get into the same handful of schools. At a recent junior parents’ meeting, the head of guidance had rattled off a series of sobering statistics, including the fact that from this year’s class of 496 graduating seniors, 53 had applied to Cornell, 57 to Northwestern, and 59 to the University of Pennsylvania. All of them had GPAs over 3.8. About ten kids were admitted to each school, and five were accepted to all three. As Grace pondered these numbers, she couldn’t help but think that ironically, this would make a good math problem on the SAT. On the subject of identifying the right safety school, the guidance counselor had referenced the terrifying, widely gossiped about, and evidently true story of the National
Merit finalist who applied to twelve schools and didn’t
get into a single one.

Sometimes when she heard these anxiety-
inducing anecdotes, Grace wondered whether
she had been smart to remain in the area
after her divorce. She had stretched
herself financially, heavily mortgaging
their house, because this was
arguably one of the best public
school systems not just in the
state, but in the country.

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