Computer Whiz College Unbound

To paraphrase the first line of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” It is a truth universally acknowledged that a high school senior in search of a bright future must be in need of a college education.

At least that’s what I’d been taught in high school some 30 years ago, along with how to conjugate Latin verbs, solve equations and identify lines of iambic pentameter there among the rhyming couplets.

So I went to college and learned even more, including how to use toothpaste to fill nail holes in my dorm room wall at the end of the year.

Graduating with a degree in English, I went on to teach and, eventually, to write for a living, to have a family, career, a home. And, no doubt much to the amazement of Sister Eugenia, my high school math teacher, I managed to do all this without once having to find the area of a parallelogram.

Which brings me to today and the stack of unopened letters from college admission departments on the desk of my son, a high school senior. He sits at his desk first thing every morning, nearly every evening, and in his spare time on weekends, too--not because it offers him a quiet place to study or to write essays for college applications, but because that’s where his computer is.

It’s an IBM clone that he built himself. The machine he uses to design and program his own Web pages and the Web pages of several small businesses that have contacted him after seeing his work in cyberspace. Those freelance projects landed him a job last summer with a local high-tech company specializing in Web design--a job that paid a whole lot more than any fast food restaurant. He continues to work there after school each weekday. And instead of all the double cheeseburgers he can eat, this position offers prestige and an enticing promise of stock options.

“It’s not really work, Mom,” he tells me when I ask how things on the job are going. “It’s more like play. Sometimes I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this!”

That said, he turns his gaze back to the big screen of his at-home computer and clicks his way through the software programs he taught himself. A hands-on learner with a flair for graphic design, he drinks in new information. For things he wants to master, he has more curiosity than you can shake a joystick at.

History, Spanish, civics, English, chemistry--these are another story.

With a solid B average, he does just enough schoolwork to keep me and his dad off his case, but not so much that it interferes with his real passions--the computer, the Internet.

So instead of filling out college applications as did his sister, now a Stanford sophomore, did when she was his age, he’s busy adding to his resume. He’s convinced that he can find a full-time job he loves at the end of this school year, one with huge potential for growth and a salary to match. And he’s probably right.

“Come on now, Mom,” he says. “When I’m out of school, is it really going to matter that I know a haiku has 17 syllables?”

Pleased to see that he’s been paying attention in class, I jump in with a small speech about how the college experience is more than classes. How it’s a good transition between the security of home and the independence and responsibility of adulthood. I launch into a short treatise on education being more than facts, touching on how it broadens the spirit, enlarges the mind, opens our eyes to worlds and times beyond our own.

But I also realize that the line from an old Paul Simon song--”When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school”--still holds a shard of truth; perhaps even more now in a world that’s changing by leaps and gigabytes.

I respect the self-reliant spirit required for a 17-year-old with good SATs to say, “I don’t think I need to go to college.”

Yet I hear myself respond in a voice that sounds a lot like my mother’s, “How can you tell if you haven’t tried it?”

It’s a new age. I know that. And I trust that my son’s choices--and they are his to make--will all work out in the end. But yet, as a parent who has always believed in the intangible as well as the practical, value of higher education, I can’t help but wish that the virtual admissions office at Cyberspace U hadn’t made its brochure quite so glossy.