With all the hours that I’ve been logging on special ed stuff this spring, Jonah’s college chores got pushed to the backburner. We knew that we were going to use our vacation week this summer to look at schools, but we didn’t know which week. After I figured out Ian’s camp schedule and Jonah’s cross country schedule (the team has already started training for next fall), we picked our days and Steve got the okay from his job.

We’re going to look at five colleges during that week. Any more than that and the little brother will rebel. So, we’ll start the week with a two day stay at Block Island, which is a little football of an island off the tip of the Long Island. We’ll get their via a ferry in Rhode Island. Then we’ll visit University of Rhode Island, University of Connecticut, U Mass at Amherst, Univesity of New Hampshire, and University of Vermont. In between the tours, we’ll do fun things for Ian. There’s about two to five hours of driving every day, which isn’t horrible.

I’m a little worried about dragging Ian around to all those tours in one week. He’ll love exploring the campuses, but hates listening to one person talk for extended periods of time. It takes so much energy for him to understand people that he shuts down after a while and gets impatient with all the blah blah blah.

Jonah’s high school guidance counselor told him to apply to twelve colleges, so we’ll have to tuck in the rest of the schools as day trips during the summer or over the holiday weekends in September. We’ll go without Steve, because he can’t possibly miss that much work. Over the summer, there are no weekend college tours.

I know these tours are silly. They focus on amenities. The tour guides can’t tell you anything important like the quality of the instruction and the financial burdens on students. Other parents take them far too seriously. Still, they are pretty interesting.

When we visited SUNY Binghamton, the tour began in front of the career development office — a huge, modern section of the student union. Clearly, they put a lot of money here. After-college job prospects was a huge focus of the tour. The tour guide rattled off the names of all her friends who had lined up jobs before graduation.