How To Put Your Child Through College Housing

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By Jeff Sawyer

It now costs one billion and twenty-five dollars per year to put a child through college, unless it’s a private school, in which case double that.

If you thought raising that kind of dough was tough, wait until move-in day, when you’re at the south end of a queen-sized sleeper couch moving north at one mile per hour in the stairwell of a dormitory built when the average man stood four-foot eight. This tiny, airless cement shaft is a maize of turns that would leave M.C. Escher begging for Dramamine. There is no geometry professor with a solution for angles this tight.

Your billion dollars entitles you to the use of one of four ancient canvas rolling carts serving the parents of the 2,200-student dorm, assuming you first get into one of the three parking spaces. Do not tarry here, or you will receive a parking ticket from a security guy in a golf cart who appears from a back alley not shown in the admissions brochure. This guy, who holds a Ph.D from this school, makes Paul Blart, Mall Cop look like Sean Connery. The ticket he leaves on your windshield will cost twenty-five dollars.

It does not matter whether your progeny is attending Florida State or the University of Alaska: move-in day will bring 100-degree temperatures and 100% humidity. Dress light – or show up naked if you like, because in the decades since you lived in a dorm yourself, your body has decomposed to where college girls can no longer see you. They look through you, past you, but never at you, with their fancy torpedo boobs that rise like a Pheonix from the asses.

The dorm room itself is exactly as you remember it: cinderblock walls coated in more layers of paint than Joan Rivers. If you have a daughter, boys will appear from nowhere to help move her boxes. They are not altruistic fellows; these Lotharios roam the halls in packs, scoping out the talent for a wet love safari that will begin before you even pull back onto the interstate. You will recognize them because you were once one of them.

Watch as they gently bounce on the mattress of the rented bunk bed they have kindly assembled out of two-by-fours for you. They are checking for squeaks. You console yourself with the thought that your daughter’s new goth roommate with dual majors in abnormal psychology and introduction to mortuary skills will ward them off.

Around the dorm, you will see Student Volunteers in special t-shirts that read “Student Volunteer.” Be nice to these kids. They are the overachievers who one day will manage your kid, when she works in a cubicle that resembles her dorm room minus the window.

One of these Student Volunteers will become very wealthy designing an iPhone app that listens to farts and identifies their musical pitch, to the amusement of millions of male college freshmen in dorms like this one all over the country. “Hey Chuck, give me another b-flat!”

Check Please

The following are deposit checks you will need to bring along on move-in day:

• room key deposit
• cable TV box deposit
• wireless internet router deposit
• rental room fridge deposit
• meals deposit
• rental bunk-bed deposit

Checks will be flying out of you like streamers out of a party popper. The word “deposit” is a misnomer; you will not be seeing any of this money ever again.

Once moved in, head immediately to the Campus Bookstore. There, you will get into The Line to Buy Textbooks. This line moves slowly, since people at the front are selling off kidneys in order to afford Economics 101, a 30-pound opus published by an alumnus who learned at this very school how to sell textbooks for unconscionable profit.

Tempering this particular outlay is the fact that all classes required to graduate are already full, leaving only electives like Music Appreciation of the 14th Century and The Luge. Electives are fillers that allow your student to graduate from a four-year program in just five years.

Exodus

At last, it’s time to go, and there will be one less person in the car than you arrived with. As you embrace this kid who just yesterday was climbing the school bus steps for the first time, you say a silent prayer that all this money, all this time, all this effort, yours and hers, will someday put her in touch with a brilliant professor who will induce a flash of insight as to what she might like to do with the rest of her life. Somehow, visionaries do still teach in colleges public and private. Said Aristotle (did he even graduate?), “Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.”

Driving slowly out of the dorm parking lot, exhausted, sweaty, broke, you glance at the side mirror. You spy back there in the window of her room that child you diapered only yesterday, and you see that she is smiling and talking now, not crying, not waving, not even looking your way.

Your role in her life, though not over, never over, has just changed forever.

© Jeff Sawyer, 2009

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Filed under Middle-aged Guys, Til death do us part, midlife

Tags: college, college dorms, college housing, moving into college, Paul Blart, paying for college