You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Paying for college.
O M G!
You have to go to college just to understand the process for getting a kid into college.
The other night I went to Franklin High School to get an hour long course on what is financially available for me as a parent.
The seminar was held in the library and was conducted by a man who dressed like a banker and has made a living out of understanding the many nuances of the federally funded financial aid and scholarship systems in this country.
Ron Gamble stood before a slide projection screen and at the top of the hour began rattling off the details of college entrance options that make the Manhattan Project seem like child’s play.
He starts with an algebraic equation. COST OF ATTENDANCE MINUS EXPECTED FAMILY CONTRIBUTION EQUALS FINANCIAL NEED.
Huh?
This might as well be E=MC2.
I’m here for the cookies and coffee. Nobody said I was going chew my pencil lead into a nub.
Mr. Gamble tells us that the magic Genie in the lamp is a federal portal called FAFSA. Every parent in America starts at this cyber portal to begin the quest for higher education.
He says you apply after the first of the year, and do it as soon as you can. He gives us a web site and then a second web site and warns of web sites that look like the FAFSA web site that will do everything the other two web sites do but it asks you for money.
HUH?
He tells us to get our W-2’s ready and our bank statements and a lock of hair to mix into this crazy witches brew of computation.
He tells us about a pin number we get as a parent and a pin number that links us to our child. Our pin number never changes, but as we add more children to the FAFSA universe, we will add more pin numbers. He says this will forever link us to our children.
I’m scratching my head at this point. I’m a writer and a lover, not a CPA. Where’s Copernicus when you need him?
What the hell is going on. I look around the room. Some parents are taking copious notes. Others have that Homer Simpson just ate a donut glazed over look of fatuousness.
Parents try and ask questions, and the man shuts them down.
“I’ll get to that” he says politely, robotically, looking at the tick tock of the clock and advancing the slide show with terminology more suited to astrophysics than college applications.
As he talks of Adjusted Gross Incomes and Asset contributions and Income Protection Allowances, I suddenly realize that you have to have a bachelors degree to fill out a college application in this country.
It’s not enough that you pay taxes and your kid has an A average. You have to mortgage your soul to the devil and sell DNA on the street corner to pry your kid into these show pony university’s.
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, he says. $50,000 a year!
And there it is.
AUBURN UNIVERSITY, HE SAYS. $39,000 a year.
BAM!
You have to go to college to get into college.
As the clock ticks and the parents grow more quietly concerned, he races over esoteric topics like PELL GRANTS and Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (That one rolls off the tongue doesn’t it?).
I am writing it down, hoping that God will part the ceiling and fill my brain with a ray of intelligence.
“Please help me understand this quagmire of crap,” I think to myself.
Mr. Gamble is a Chinese mathematician telling us to fill out the FAFSA form on the stroke of midnight 2011.
“I hear that if we don’t fill it out on New Year’s Day, there won’t be any Lottery Money left,” One parent says sheepishly.
Gamble laughs the laugh a coyote laughs right before it leaps over the fence and starts picking it’s teeth with chicken bones.
“It’s a rumor,” he says. “But get it done fast.”
Then he says something that sums up the insidiousness of the whole process.
“you’re going to need your W-2’s, but since you won’t have your
W-2’s till late January or early February, you’ll need to guesstimate. And there is a practice FAFSA sheet where you can do that.”
Guesstimate?
Did Robert Oppenheimer guesstimate nuclear fusion?
I am eagerly waiting for the clock to strike the top of the hour.
“Thanks for coming,” he says to the fidgeting group of worried parents.
“I’ll stay as long as needed to answer any questions you have.”
I get up and walk out.
I would need another month of one on one time with the FAFSA Professor just to understand what to do.
I sure hope my kid liked high school, because I’m not sure his dad is smart enough to get him into college in this new world order.
And that is Crazy.